Moving On - Part 1

In which I discuss the getting there.

Each of the visits has ended the same way: Driving away in the late afternoon light; gold and green fields stretching out across the small valley to the hills, dappled with shadow and just far enough away to look soft rather than craggy, on the other side; the whole scene lit with a Thomas Kincaide glow.

In a little more than a month, I won't be there to visit; I'll be there to stay.

It's strange that I'm about to settle in a small town. I grew up in the suburbs of a decent sized metropolis feeling undisguised contempt for rural life. I went to college 2,200 miles from home, taking a family road trip to get there. We drove the back roads as often as interstates -- all the better to see the country with, my dear, and still my preference for travel :-) -- and while I appreciated the scenery along the way, I couldn't believe that people could actually live like that: In dead-end and dying towns, miles from anywhere, with no industry, no arts, no diversity, no shopping. Yuck.

I aspired to be a sophisticated urbanite, myself. I wanted tall buildings, all-night laundromats with neon signs on the fritz, strange accents, a sea of uncaring strangers jostling each other as they passed, telephone poles littered with posters for underground bands and slips announcing rooms for rent. I wanted to feel the efficient click of my high heels on pavement. I wanted to hear a street musician's lonely saxophone wafting up from the subway.

And yet.... I'm just full of complexities and contradictions, lol.

At the same time I dreamed of blissful urban anonymity -- and actually for as long as I can remember -- I nursed a fantasy of openness, of emptiness, of room to breathe and fresh air to do it in, of a road that stretched out straight and gray for miles and miles, its inertia uninterrupted by towns or people. My adolescent poetry was full of trains and highways all headed away from the hurry and bustle toward ... freedom, I guess. The unreachable far horizon.

I guess it speaks to my naturally melodramatic personality that I simultaneously longed for all and nothing -- the biggest city ever and no city at all.

I've become better at integrating these disparate parts of myself as I've gotten older, and I'm to the point now that I think I could be happy living just about anywhere -- even in one of those small towns I felt such disdain for at 17. What it lacks in commotion, my new town makes up in serenity. It's undeniably beautiful. The place and the people are open; the air is sweet with carefully tended farms and gardens. It does not, as far as I know, have an all-night laundromat, but that's all right: I can turn on my dryer at midnight, then step out alone on the back deck and enjoy a swath of stars brighter than any city lights.

I used to believe the journey was the destination -- that the going, the never settling, was the point -- and maybe that was true for me at the time. But now I wonder if this, finally arriving at a destination, is only the beginning of my journey.


~RCH~