have you ever set foot in a place for the first time, fully taken in the scene with all your senses, and known without a doubt that you're home?
i have. several times, actually. it's a sort-of serial homing issue for me.
growing up, i never strayed too far from the place where i was born. . . literally. from my pre-school, my elementary school, my middle school, my high school, my college, and even my law school, i could easily drive to the hospital where i was born, within half an hour or so.
of course, there were things i loved about this place, but then, there were also those things i hated. people i loved where all around, but then again, so were people that i didn't love so much. it was this mix of good and bad that settled into a feeling of ordinary deadness.
by the time i started my own family, claustrophobia had come on full force, and it was only a few years into my daughter's life before i started feeling like this place i knew so well just wasn't the home i wanted. so, with our families grabbing at our ankles, my husband, daughter and i managed to get free, and off we went to start a new life 3,000 miles away, in eugene, oregon.
the feeling of freedom after arriving in eugene was unparalleled. finally, i could define myself without a peanut gallery of voices that really knew me better than i knew myself. i could decide what to do with my work life, my daughter, or my day without a sea of opinions to sort through. i could look to the future as a big and beautifully blank canvas, rather than a list of obligations and expectations that i needed to coordinate so that everyone would be satisfied.
at first, it was a total vacation from reality. we hardly worked, and every weekend was yet another exploration of some fantastically beautiful place we'd never been before. as we hit the eight month mark, the reality of needing to end the steady outflow from our bank account and increase the inflow with some steady jobs began sinking in. with that dose of reality, our new home felt less homey, and within four months or so, we road tripped our way across four states and landed in our next home sweet home - santa fe, new mexico.
and sweet it was. we were welcomed into our new abode by a glorious southwest sunset, and the house we'd arranged to rent just weeks before turned out to be absolutely breath taking. within weeks of landing, we had our daughter in the loveliest little school, had met a slew of like-minded friends, and our newly planted life was already beginning to feel like it had some roots.
and on things went for a few months . . . until even with the jobs we'd found, the money really started to dwindle. so much so that i had to swallow my pride, and swallow hard. there seemed no choice but to ask those parents whose hearts i broke if just maybe they could help us stay afloat. and they did, and we got serious about figuring out how to stabilize in our new and beautiful home.
fortunately or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it, about a year into our stint in santa fe, a perfectly matched job opportunity for me arose in a nearby town. fortunately because it was a job teaching law that i really wanted to do, and with summers off but pay that would still turn around our financial situation. unfortunately because the nearby town actually wasn't that nearby. albuquerque was over an hour away.
after trying to figure out a way to keep this great home and take the dream job, it seemed clear that wasn't going to work out so well. the flow of life was pretty clear that it was time to go, yet again. having become somewhat obedient to these waves of movement that rarely explained themselves, again, we moved.
the job did provide the stability we needed - steady income, steady routine, steady residency in one town . . . well, not really one town. we still managed to switch our zip code and town at a rate of about once a year, but all of our addresses clustered around the job which kept life steadier than it had been for a few years.
but even with all this growing stability, albuquerque wasn't the home that we chose with wide eyed excitement. albuquerque was actually the town we drove through with our noses turned up when we first blew into new mexico.
i had learned to admire how beautiful the sandias were all lit up at sunset, and i'd found my favorite restaurants and bookstores. my mental roadmap of albuquerque was set, and it gave me that nice feeling of comfort in always knowing where i was and how to get where i wanted to go. maybe, through the back door, we did in fact stumble upon a new home.
after being faced with the statistic that our ten year old had lived in ten houses in her short little life, my husband and i did have to admit, we were so sick of moving. the renting game which was so freeing, uncommitted, and wonderful (especially during the housing market crash), had become a frustrating lot of ups and downs. maybe it was time to settle down, and maybe home didn't need to give us that warm and fuzzy feeling of the towns we hand picked. maybe home was actually closer than we thought.
to be continued. . .
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