Home
My sense of home isn’t stable right now. That isn’t a bad thing. It just is. Losing my marriage brought on a really scary sense of the rug being pulled out from under me; instability. So I learned to dance on a shifting carpet. I’ve been living here for seven years, and although I didn’t like it at first, I’ve made so many great connections here. Leaving is sad, and yet, I’m very excited to be doing it.
When I’m here, I know where the grocery store is. I know where to buy the best brand of canned tomatoes. I know when and where the farmer’s market is. I know on what night choirs rehearse. I know where to take a yoga class, where to kayak, where to karaoke, where to hike. I know where I can find the really good cat food. I know enough people to throw a party and know that it will be a great time. When I move, I will have to learn all of this stuff again. That’s not bad. It just is.
At the same time, my parents’ have sold their house. We moved into that house when I was 10 years old. Now I am 34. Before we lived there, we lived in a place about a mile away in the same neighborhood. We first moved there when I was four, so for 30 years, my parents’ neighborhood was the place I went wen I said I was going "back home." It was "base" when things weren’t going quite right.
So I don’t have the stability of a marriage. I don’t have the stability of the place to go home to, and I don’t have the stability of staying here. This has been home for 7 years. I’ve been here through a lot, and it’s a hard place to leave. I have packed 10 boxes now. This study is starting to look bare. Empty shelves. Empty closet. A large pile of boxes.
And yet, there is stability in my life, and that is in the form of people. I have wonderful people in my life. My parents don’t have that house, but I still have them. And on a more daily-basis, I have Jeep and Maggie. I adore these girls. I have my old friends, who live all over, and who I know I can call for both important and mundane reasons. I also have my online friends, many of whom have become friend in real life, too. I think of them as hanging out in a box (my computer), ready to chat no matter where I live. I’ve seen it so many times. An online friend moves across the country, and I’m still talking to them the next day, usually about something silly and unimportant. Silly and unimportant gets me through the day sometimes.
The world just keeps getting smaller and smaller.
