I was talking to a dear friend recently about her upcoming move. After we hung up, I started thinking about all the moves, all the goodbye's we've said in the past three years. I think that's part of why this move has been a difficult one for me, because I'm still missing two places. Just as soon as I had gotten my feet under me in Atlanta, it was time to go again.
But- there are no goodbyes on the horizon anymore, at least as far as we can see.
My sense of who I am as a person is so deeply connected to place. Leaving the South, where I'd lived most of my life, where so many important things happened to me, felt like losing a part of myself.
But slowly, slowly, I'm making new connections in this new place. I realized this as I dropped the kids off for their various camps this morning (moment of reverence for the wonderfulness of your car gradually emptying from five children to one).
First stop was Marley's new school, where she gets to go to kindercamp for the next two weeks and have a little taste of what she'll be doing in the fall. We saw old friends from preschool. We know people now. That exhausting feeling of introducing and explaining yourself every minute of every day is gone.
Then it was down Bay street to the beach, where the boys and their neighborhood friends have beach baseball camp this week. The ocean was so blue, and the streets were so quiet. I'm learning that when you live in a tourist town, quiet is special, and you soak it in. I smiled to think that we get to live in a place where people come on vacation.
Then Eleanor and I drove home to our cows and our view of the bay. We just had a quiet morning around the house, and I thought back over the past year and all the new things we've done and seen. I had the sense that we made it through the hardest part- the goodbye's and the hello's.
Now we can just be.
