In the midnight hour when the wind stings lungs and makes eyes burn for the want of sun. When the reality sends you gray skies accompanied by snowy days and cold hallways, I am in the mood. Putting on another day of shirt, sweater, jacket, gloves to face brown Mondays, we say, "If only." Praying time will leap a month closer to the end, we prance like giddy kids waiting for school bell chimes marking recess time. But all the while I am in the mood.

Some count days until real jobs, real world, business suits completed with dress up shoes as they flip through the memories, past years, and all the while I am in the mood.

Coasting through Wednesday to Friday we watch as the clock tick tocks closer to summertime, and I am in the mood.

Listening to Nina Simone I am in the mood for California rays of tangerine warm with ocean blue skies and enough green to make the strongest cry. With dry heat burns skin leather hard, a premanent smile appears as I imagine sitting deep in the groove of Highway 99 smelling nothing but cows and hay for miles.

Yes, I am in the mood for Grandma Mimi's Sunday brunch complete with the world's best macaroni and cheese. When I get there she greets me with a "Hey babygal," and the latest happenings in our small town. And when we are done eating she will fill me up with tin foil leftovers.

As I work through the one o'clock hour, I am in the mood for the quiet house of Coelho Avenue where nothing happens but the occasional door-to-door vacuum salesman. The house that creaks between the third and fourth step of the entranceway and smells of the same cinnamon potpourri of 10 years ago.

Walking into stale classroom air I am forever in the mood to drive slowly down Demere Road with windows rolled down stopping every once and awhile to buy strawberries from fruit stands. And every so often I'll take a deep breath of nothing but valley air, summer intertwined in alfalfa fields.

There, all in my imagination, I am thinking of only one thing: how long I can stay here in this place they call the Central Valley. Amongst the Chevy trucks, Wrangler jeans dusted with so much hard work and cowboy boots.

In my mind surrounded by rows and rows of Tulare land that holds my childhood, I am thinking of: so many scraped knees, days of bottled Coke and Charleston chews melted to the wrapper, street races in jelly shoes and Sunday dresses, dance-offs between break dancing cousins, beat-boxing contest with neighbor kids knowing my brother would win, riding on the handlebars of my best friend's banana-seat bike, wearing pig tails so tight my face itched, softball in my backyard never playing for points, and hours of go fish. I am forever in the mood ... to go home.

• In the mood