Home Again, Home Again, Jiggity-Jig

So, it has happened. The Big Move is now a thing of the past, or of past tense: I have moved. All those months (since January '07) of nervous expended energy planning, mulling, organizing, finalizing...the moment came and went, as moments do, and I survived it, all of it, all the myriad details. Although I had never done this before, I knew that many, many average citizens such as myself had rented trucks of all sizes and hauled their crap uneventfully from one end of this great continent to the other. No big deal.

I quite my job on Friday, 9/21/07, and spent the next week cleaning my apartment from top to bottom. A week later, the following Friday, I was a noodle and living in an empty (though really clean) space, which felt weird and sort of generic. The landlord was coming to do a walk-through and about 45 minutes beforehand, I'd run into the building's caretaker in the hall. He became all sentimental about my time as his (and his girlfriend's) neighbor and heaped upon me many kindnesses, which caused me to burst into tears that would last through not only Friday's walk-through (I'm sure the landlord thought I'd come completely undone, but true Midwesterner that he is, he totally kept his cool and seemed completely unfazed by my histrionics) but Saturday's pack-up. I was a veritable waterworks; I'm amazed I have any salt left in my body.



I left Minneapolis early on the afternoon of Saturday, 9/29/07, after picking up the 16-foot Penske truck at 9:00 that morning, loading it with the help of a few good friends (5, to be exact) who came not only bearing strong backs, biceps and quads, but lattes in to-go trays, a thermos of coffee, and all sorts of bakery goods to quell mid-moving hunger pangs.

I was too nervous and sad, really, to eat anything myself, although I did finally inhale a croissant once we were on the road. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Everything was loaded according to plan; B. carried out the vacuum and when I protested, saying I'd meant to do one final sucking-up of bits of detritus, she replied, "You know, at some point you just gotta say 'I'm done.'" So I decided I was done.
The cat was put in her carrier after being forcibly extracted from her spot in the dark, dank nether-reaches of my under-sink cabinet where she'd fearfully wedged herself, and after my final teary curbside goodbyes, which included kissing the neighbor's fuzzy-headed black cat and hugging my helpers, Friend, Cat and Self were off on a moving adventure that included a quick pit-stop at the corner hardware store for a padlock to keep my possessions safe in the truck.

I have to say, I profoundly hate goodbyes. They never feel like enough; there's this small, final window of shared time to say whatever you need to say for closure--for now, as it's understood, because plans are always made to write/call/visit, futons and extra rooms are offered for crashing, yet still--you can't possibly fill that tiny, final moment with all the meaningful, relevant thoughts bouncing around your head and your heart.

I want to say, take care of your cancer, I don't want you to die, or your presence has been such a comfort here, and I appreciate your friendship, or, simply, thank you for accepting me, but I can't; it's just too full a moment, too loaded and too poignant and really, actually, very hard, so I hope, in my face and my tears and the few words I do manage to squeak out, that the person I am having closure with understands fully just how I feel and how difficult the letting go is.

And I had a lot of those moments leading up to the Big Day, weeks of them, in fact, with friends, co-workers, neighbors, my entire 12-step group, even my hairdresser, culminating Friday, 10/5/07, when I put my intrepid roadtripping friend B. on a Minneapolis-bound plane after we'd shared months of planning, traversed 6 states & 1700 miles, crashed in 3 motel rooms, downed an assortment of road food (I will never eat beef jerky again), snapped digital pix of much whizzing western United States scenery, listened to a wide variety of tunes on her iPod, spent two days in downtown Portland, and downed a few steaming cups of Stumptown coffee.



That was the very final goodbye, the final, teeny, absolute last connection to a now-finished piece of my life that was at once nurturing, fun, hard, lonely, responsible, enlightening, challenging, deeply painful at times, important, relevant, full of personal revelations and good growth, and very, very, very cold.

I could not have returned to my roots had I not gone and lived there first and experienced all of that. Things happened that helped me become the person I desperately needed to become, and I have come back here better, and different, and calmer, and more adult, and more me. That's how this journey needed to unfold. I know this now.

And so I'm back here, finally, in Portland, a new roommate to my old friend D., our respective cats, the tabby & the tuxedo having finally made an uneasy peace, my room all set up with my familiar bed and duvet and the cat's hammock and my night table and basket to hold my assorted reading materials, almost exactly as it used to be, the small framed Winter lake scene oil painting my boss gave me as a going-away present hanging on the hallway wall, a reminder (minus the chill) of what I will be missing in January, and February. And March. And so on.

More significantly, I feel like I've resumed a relationship with that lost 20% of myself that I'd been missing for 6 years in the Midwest, where, as I explained to others, I was really only living 80% of my life. I couldn't be truly who I needed to be there; I was in the minority, sort of, in terms of my values, and my food choices, and my outlook on life in general, my pop cultural proclivities and my outspokenness about various things political, or gender- or animal-related, whatever.

When the VP of our group at the big corporation at which I worked heard I was returning here, his reply was, "She seems like she belongs on the West Coast." I'm not sure it was entirely a compliment, although his observation was nonetheless correct.

I've come back to my home soil--that is, the west coast, since I was raised in Berkeley--and to that formerly lost 20%, which seems to have been waiting for me here right along. I fit in effortlessly here. I'm not stared at. No one says, "That's different," when they're not sure how to disagree. I don't feel ignored, either; I just feel....typical.



And I like that, very much.

So I learned I could survive the slight, repetitive ripping of numerous goodbyes and big transitions and months of planning and driving a 16-foot truck through unfamiliar states when I hadn't driven a car for 6 years, that all of it was just something else I could undertake and follow through on successfully, and now I can move on to my life's next thing.

'Cause, as I've also learned, there's always a next thing.