Moving Forward, Looking Back
Well. About ten days ago I smooshed all my junk, three kids, two cats, and a hamster into my little Honda Fit at 6 am. I was reminded, while wrassling the toddler into her five point harness, of trying to squish toothpaste back into the tube.
We set out. I had an incredulous feeling-- I know I am forgetting important things, I know I am doing this imperfectly. But I'm doing it anyway. A feeling of walking off of a cliff and hoping that your earnest and in depth study of Leonardo Da Vinci's flying machines will save you on the way down.
The road was long and dark. The 6.5 hour push to Boise took about 6000 years. We didn't stop-- well, just once, to lift the bikes off the back of the car and check on the cats (unhappy, but drugged, thanks vet) and eat hummus and tortillas.
And the next push, from Boise to our new home, was a fugue state. All weathers occurred, all landscapes blurred crazily through time like a slowmotion watercolor. Greening riverbottoms dried into broad late winter sage, heaps of dirty snow shouldered the road, pine sentinels crowded in the dark. And finally, street lights, and our quiet cul de sac.
Our new home. Our first home.
We were able to take our time. A year ago the first inkling inkled. Our time in Utah was coming to an end. I started going room to room, culling, organizing, packing. Before I had any solid plan, I wanted to get organized enough that we could move in a weekend. So it has been slow and thoughtful process. I'm sure from the outside it just looks like madness. Why leave a place as easy and familiar as Utah? After 2.5 years I had found my people-- my dear forever-heart friends. The girls had found their places in school. We were safely nestled in a beautiful network of friends and family, familiar streets overlaid with generations of memories. Living in my grandmother's house with my 16 year old mother's mural on the wall, down the street from the place she grew up and the cloud-watched hillside where she is buried. Utah marks firsts and lasts-- it is dense, overwoven with family and personal memories. I was born there. I was married there. The last time my girls saw their daddy it was in those Utah mountains. Great beauty, great heartbreak. Heavy cords of memory and connection.
Maybe that net was beginning to fray for me -- tangle and entwist. Maybe it was too much connection, too many memories, too much interconnection.
Maybe that's overthinking it.
I could leave. I wanted to. I did.
And here we are!
This move has been a ritual rewriting of our last move. We left Kauai in the worst of circumstances. No planning, no warning, no place of our own-- just a sheer freefall plummet. This move is the opposite of that. It's a climb, possibly a trudge into homeownership, as people keep warning me, but it's OURS.
This house is a rewrite of all of our previous houses. Not to erase them, but to remake them. It's all new paths-- new roads, new relationships. A few filaments-- enough to form a rope bridge across the abyss.
So this is a latenight way to say,
Hooray Utah! We loved you! We can't wait to visit! And I'm so glad we live somewhere else now!
We set out. I had an incredulous feeling-- I know I am forgetting important things, I know I am doing this imperfectly. But I'm doing it anyway. A feeling of walking off of a cliff and hoping that your earnest and in depth study of Leonardo Da Vinci's flying machines will save you on the way down.
The road was long and dark. The 6.5 hour push to Boise took about 6000 years. We didn't stop-- well, just once, to lift the bikes off the back of the car and check on the cats (unhappy, but drugged, thanks vet) and eat hummus and tortillas.
And the next push, from Boise to our new home, was a fugue state. All weathers occurred, all landscapes blurred crazily through time like a slowmotion watercolor. Greening riverbottoms dried into broad late winter sage, heaps of dirty snow shouldered the road, pine sentinels crowded in the dark. And finally, street lights, and our quiet cul de sac.
Our new home. Our first home.
We were able to take our time. A year ago the first inkling inkled. Our time in Utah was coming to an end. I started going room to room, culling, organizing, packing. Before I had any solid plan, I wanted to get organized enough that we could move in a weekend. So it has been slow and thoughtful process. I'm sure from the outside it just looks like madness. Why leave a place as easy and familiar as Utah? After 2.5 years I had found my people-- my dear forever-heart friends. The girls had found their places in school. We were safely nestled in a beautiful network of friends and family, familiar streets overlaid with generations of memories. Living in my grandmother's house with my 16 year old mother's mural on the wall, down the street from the place she grew up and the cloud-watched hillside where she is buried. Utah marks firsts and lasts-- it is dense, overwoven with family and personal memories. I was born there. I was married there. The last time my girls saw their daddy it was in those Utah mountains. Great beauty, great heartbreak. Heavy cords of memory and connection.
Maybe that net was beginning to fray for me -- tangle and entwist. Maybe it was too much connection, too many memories, too much interconnection.
Maybe that's overthinking it.
I could leave. I wanted to. I did.
And here we are!
This move has been a ritual rewriting of our last move. We left Kauai in the worst of circumstances. No planning, no warning, no place of our own-- just a sheer freefall plummet. This move is the opposite of that. It's a climb, possibly a trudge into homeownership, as people keep warning me, but it's OURS.
This house is a rewrite of all of our previous houses. Not to erase them, but to remake them. It's all new paths-- new roads, new relationships. A few filaments-- enough to form a rope bridge across the abyss.
So this is a latenight way to say,
Hooray Utah! We loved you! We can't wait to visit! And I'm so glad we live somewhere else now!
Beautiful. Thanks for sharing :)
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