Nomad

Over his cup of tea this morning, Chris said, “We’re settled.” We were sitting on the deck gearing up our loins to face a morning’s hard work, Chris working in the yard and me sitting in the heat watching him.

Always the tone of surprise … he made his pronouncement with the tone of voice that someone would use who had just uncovered a stash gold doubloons, or dragon’s teeth. Moving is, and always has been, part of our lives — but not now. It’s not, “Oh no, we have to move,” but “Yay, we get to move.” It’s an adventure. When I read Laura Ingalls Wilder, in the Little House books, talking about her father’s yearning to push on to the edge of the expanding frontier, I feel the same thing, only with me, it’s not wanting to leave “civilization” behind so much as to reinvent myself again. A move is a fresh start, fo’ sho.’

But it’s not gonna happen.

It’s not an extraordinary thing. It’s a normal thing that just crept up on us: we like our house, we like our neighbors, we like our kids’ school, and we, separately and together, recognize that our lives are good here, and a move isn’t going to happen unless we force it, and we’re not going to force it.

That I might not only live, but live in the same place for the foreseeable future would have been unthinkable four years ago. My thought was always, “I’d better get better before we move.” Now that I’m better, and we’re not moving, I’m facing a new kind of adventure.

Of course the very fact of my publishing this post is going to set in motion a chain of events that will result in our relocating because that’s how life is — and that will be okay too. But I can’t count on it. It’s very unsettling, being settled.