Another goodbye. This old house, the one we have loved and labored over for the past five years, is sold and we are looking for a new place to live, spending countless hours exploring our options. We are moving primarily to get closer to health care, but it isn’t just that. There are many people who fight to remain here, in this isolated little town, even when they clearly need to get closer to a hospital and/or access to a grocery store, a home health care aide, or other support systems, but those are people with roots and years of memories and attachments to the place that I don’t have. They have always belonged here.
Sometimes I think I don’t deserve to belong, perhaps that is why I always wind up leaving. I’ve loved and left too many places. Oh, there’s always been a good reason, but still, I wonder exactly why those reasons always seem to find me so easily, almost as though I’m looking for them. Is it because my childhood was a transitory experience, one where living in different places and going to different schools and always being the new kid was a simple fact of life? I didn’t like it, but maybe I got used to it. Maybe that became my normal. Also, there was an element of adventure there, even though, honestly, the transitions were never smooth and I was perennially ill at ease.
My mom moved a lot before her marriage to my dad. My dad moved a lot after serving in the Pacific theater as a Marine during WWII. When they got together they moved a few times before I was born, and then they remained relatively stable in the town where my brother and I started school while they were together. The rented house on Sheridan Road in Kenosha, Wisconsin is the first home I remember. When they split up around the time I was in first grade, all the moving started again, first to an apartment on the other side of town and then we kids were sent to live with relatives across the country. After that we moved several times with Mom and our step dad. By the fifth grade I had lived in Wisconsin, Nevada, and Illinois and had attended five different school districts.
Then they decided to move to Minnesota. We stayed with my cousins there first. Next we moved into a little rental in North St. Paul. I think we were there less than a year, when my step dad came home and announced we were moving again, one more time—the last time—because he had found us a house to buy!
That was the smooth move, even though it meant starting over again in another new school, because it was the one that read like a story with a happy ending. It was going to be the one place we stayed forever. And I walked into that house, so much better than any other house I could imagine living in, and I fell in love. The Winslow Avenue house wasn’t too big, but it was sturdy and freshly painted, with two stories and a fireplace in the living room. It had window boxes filled with blooming red geraniums and a brass door knocker. Elms and maples and pines lined the well-kept lawns up and down the street, and the school was just a few blocks away. I walked to Frances Grass Junior High, and I met my lifelong friend and loved it all. But I was growing up, too fast, and the time slipped away, and I was drawn back time and again to another place, the first place I remembered, and to my father who lived there and to my first lifelong friend.
Meanwhile, the dream house in Minnesota was sold and my mom and stepdad moved to an apartment in Southern California. After that I moved on my own I can’t remember how many times. Minnesota, Wisconsin, California—back and forth. My longest residence was in the beautiful San Bernardino Mountain communities of Running Springs, Lake Arrowhead and Blue Jay, California, a place that I will always love.
And now it’s time to move again. I do love my home and friends here, and my church and library, and the mountains, the beautiful wild mountains and the endless trails. The silence that seeps into my soul. I’m sure moving to a place with nearby health care, groceries, water, trees, and more activities will be good—it’s just so hard to decide on the right place to go, and my heart aches as I can’t move toward my children and grandchildren, only farther away, again.
It’s overwhelming and frightening, and at our stage in life there won’t be much chance for a “do over” if we get it wrong. I think about where my parents ended up, my mom who began her life in Faribault, Minnesota and finished it in a little apartment in Anaheim, California, and my dad who started out in a large apartment in Chicago, Illinois and ended in a small condo in Brookings, Oregon. Were they happy with their choices? What drove them away from their original homes, friends, and loving families? Was it the war? I can only guess. And what called them to the various places they ran to? What wildness, what pain, what longing? Whatever it was, I clearly have felt it, too. Inherited it, I guess.
Feeling lost and looking for solace this morning, I picked up a book—always a good idea—and I came across the following lines. I found them deeply moving. I hope you find something in them that helps you get through your day, too.
“…We are in the habit of imagining our lives to be linear, a long march from birth to death in which we mass our powers, only to surrender them again, all the while slowly losing our youthful beauty. This is a brutal untruth. Life meanders like a path through the woods. We have seasons when we flourish and seasons when the leaves fall from us, revealing our bare bones. Given time, they grow again.” Katherine May, from Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times.
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