Dear San Francisco,

In four days, I will leave you after almost two years of calling you home.

You are less than 47 square miles…a small city with a giant heartbeat …wrapped in fog, cliffs, cypress trees and the Pacific Ocean. You are proof that cities can be both alive and deeply human. Long before the world began talking about mental health and wellness, you understood something important: people need movement, nature and community to thrive. Every person here can reach a park within a 10-minute walk, and somehow, within this small City, there are nearly 500 parks.

Thank you for the trails hidden between neighborhoods and the winding paths that suddenly opened to dramatic cliffs and endless ocean. Thank you for the mornings, days and evenings walking Dudley in Sutro Heights and Lands End. Thank you for being the place where my partner proposed to me. Sutro Park will forever feel sacred to me because of that.

Thank you for the flowers growing wildly and unapologetically beautiful everywhere: California poppies dancing in the wind, buttercups, Pride of Madeira towering over coastal trails, the electric colors of the ice plants spilling over cliffs, and the succulents that somehow look like flowers themselves. Thank you for letting nature remain a little untamed here.

Thank you for the excellent public transportation…for the Muni rides that reduced my carbon footprint alongside thousands of others and became the best people-watching in town. I loved riding through Golden Gate Park on my way to Sip Tea Room on weekends, watching runners, skaters, families, musicians, dog walkers and happy people filling the park with life. Golden Gate Park itself feels impossible…enormous…stretching from the Haight all the way to Ocean Beach, holding bison paddocks, lakes, windmills, museums, gardens, trails, concerts and quiet corners all inside one incredible green ribbon through the City.

The Muni rolled past the de Young Museum, the Japanese Tea Garden, the California Academy of Sciences and the Botanical Garden…many of them free or accessible to residents because this City believes art, science, nature and culture should belong to everyone.

And the tea room…I will miss it dearly.

I will miss the sounds of teacups and conversations and laughter. I will miss the warmth, the chaos and the rhythm of pouring tea for a packed room full of beautifully different people. The tea room felt like San Francisco itself: diverse, expressive, welcoming, joyful. A straight white couple was in the minority and might be sitting beside someone in black leather and goth attire, beside women in glamorous hats and dresses with trains, beside mothers teaching their little girls how to have proper tea. Everyone belonged. Everyone was interesting. Everyone was accepted exactly as they were.

I loved working there with family…some by blood, all by heart.

Thank you for the Pacific sunsets just five minutes from my home, and during a couple weeks a year, from my living room! For giant waves crashing against cliffs and massive rocks rising from the sea. For Heart Rock and Seal Rock standing quietly offshore while pelicans skimmed the water below them and super-smart ravens hovered at eye level.

And thank you for Ocean Beach…cold, powerful and humbling. A place where fearless surfers paddled into massive, perfectly shaped waves beneath gray skies and circling gulls. I managed to paddle out a few times myself, and every session demanded respect. It was always a little scary, a little hard and deeply humbling. Ocean Beach never let me forget how small I was compared to the Pacific …and somehow, that felt grounding.

The Seal Rock Inn was just two blocks from our house, and is where Hunter S. Thompson wrote:

“Dawn is coming up in San Francisco now: 6:09 a.m. I can hear the rumble of early morning buses under my window at the Seal Rock Inn… out here at the far end of Geary Street: This is the end of the line, for buses and everything else, the western edge of America.”

We lived there…at the edge of America…for almost two years. In our fantastic little bubble.

Thank you for the foghorns on the Golden Gate Bridge I could sometimes hear late at night from bed on especially misty evenings. I will miss falling asleep to that distant sound more than I can explain. I’ll miss the movement of the fog, fondly known as “Karl” by San Franciscans.

Thank you for being a City where I could walk from my home to cliffs and watch orcas, gray whales, dolphins, sea lions and hawks soaring over the coastline. Thank you for the Golden Gate Bridge…somehow always visible, always breathtaking, always reminding me exactly where I was. The most photographed bridge in the world, and still somehow impossible to photograph properly because no picture captures how it feels to suddenly see it emerge through the fog. But it was always beautiful…bright red lit up by the morning sun and especially at night, illuminated with perfectly placed, just-enough artificial light.

Thank you for Giants games at Oracle Park, with kayaks and sailboats floating beyond the outfield walls and some of the best fans in baseball cheering beside the bay.

Thank you for being surrounded by protected lands, redwoods, beaches, vineyards, mountains, and open space all within reach of the City.

But most of all, thank you, San Francisco, for being a place where people are free to love who they love without fear or judgment. A place where individuality is celebrated instead of hidden. A place where everyone with peace in their heart belongs.

And finally, thank you for helping my daughter heal. That is why we came here, and you gave us exactly what we needed.

We leave with heavy hearts. But I leave knowing exactly where I’m headed …back to Wilmington, North Carolina. Back to my business that I love, my dear friends, warm water, old surf spots, kayaking those incredible waterways again and the joy of having both my daughters nearby once more.

Still… part of me will forever belong to San Francisco. And I know I’ll be back.

With love,

Kay Lynn