We drove up a steep hill in our packed doughnut food truck to see our new house in Glassell Park for the first time. But we weren’t prepared for the stress of that hillside drive. Who knew that such pockets of treacherous roads existed just east of the 2 Freeway? This was a different level of driving stress than we had ever encountered on New York City or New Jersey roads.
There, people whizzed by while holding the horn. Or the wrong lane would take you to a different state. But here in L.
A., every turn we made led to a new hazard: a blind curve with a speeding Tesla coming down the other side; a gardener’s pickup truck with protruding tools parked to the side but still taking up half the road; low branches that swatted the top of the truck and then snapped back to spank us in the rear. Wait, this street is two lanes? I gripped the door, mouth tight, barely breathing.
When we finally parked the bright blue doughnut truck in our new driveway, my husband turned to me and said, “Oh man, my butt was clenched that entire time.” Jersey City to Los Angeles. That was the journey I’d made with Dan, my husband of six years, with his mini-doughnut catering truck as our moving vehicle.
We’d park and leave all our belongings alone overnight. I wondered if the truck would make our mattress and towels smell the way Dan did when he came home after working — the greasy sweetness of fried dough and powdered sugar. But the smells didn’t have that much time to sink in.
We did it .
