I found out on March 1st that my Dad had Brain Cancer. The "non-curable" kind. Whatever the hell that means. I don't give a shit if it is curable as long as it is livable. And it is... for how long we will have to see. God willing, I will have my Dad for decades to come. But when I returned from my Dad's surgery in Boston, Jimmy mentioned maybe we should reconsider a move to Charlotte to get closer to my family. We had tabled that discussion about 5 years earlier. I immediately blew him off. "No! We are not moving. We are happy here. We love it here." He kind of laughed and said "Honey hear me out". He made a good case about why we should reconsider it (and he seduced me with images of FALL and FIREPLACES), but the best one was when he said, "Something in my gut is just telling me we are supposed to do this. That I am supposed to make this happen for my Family" As I learned from my friends, The Wilsons, recently, you don't ignore something like that. So we agreed to start looking into it. Just considering it. Jimmy even let me tell my Mom and swear her to secrecy. 2014 I told her. Summertime. Right after school gets out. A few weeks later, Jimmy shocked me even further when he came to me in April and said, "screw it. If we are going to go, let's just go now. Let's get out there before school starts this Fall- 2013!!" "No way! Not gonna happen that fast:, I said. "Let's try", he said. And it did happen. Every step of the way, I reminded him God will either bless it or block it. We kept praying on it, and kept looking inside ourselves for clues as to what we should be doing.
And it went so smoothly. All of it. Everything fell into place exactly as it needed to. And so that was that. My house was sold in 24 hours and the house I bought in Charlotte, sold in 24 hours. Funny huh?? And just like that we had an official move date. Now I am starting to finally understand why my friends were so distraught. I said to Jimmy, I am not dying I am just moving. We will still be friends. We will stay in touch. But I get it now... It is because they didn't really have time to prepare. I told them in mid April we were considering moving to Charlotte in 2014 and we were driving away 3 months later in July. They barely had time to process the news and say goodbye before we were gone. And I think I must have not really had time to process any of it either. Till now. I still look around sometimes at the greenery, at my neighborhood, even at my house every time I pull up to it and still think, where am I? How did I get here? Is this really where we live now? Did we really just do this? It is not sadness I feel, just awe. Maybe a little anxiety mixed with a little excitement mixed with a little wonder mixed with a little fear. It just doesn't seem real yet. We were happy in Arizona. We were settled. We were planted. We had set down roots and watered them. We had bloomed. We were a part of a community. Part of groups. Part of a Church. I was about to start a position on the PTO Board. We had friends and family of choice there. All my favorite places, restaurants, shops, and fun little places to take my kids. It was all so comfortable. It was so familiar. It was so us. But you want to know a secret??? I never called Arizona Home.
It was a pet peeve of Jimmy's that I would not call Arizona home. We lived there for almost 10 years and the only place I ever called Home was Boston. I would say to my kids, "Girls we are going home to Boston" when I booked us flights, and Jimmy would laugh and correct me and say "Honey, this is their home. They are born and raised in Arizona. Boston is not home to them." I would think, oh yeah whoops!! I would talk about going home all the time and he would say, "Honey you are Home." And he was right of course. Home is where my heart is. Home is where my kids and my husband are. But home to me will always be where my Family is too. My parents, my siblings, my Papa, my nieces and nephews, cousins, friends etc. Maybe if my parents didn't still live in my childhood home that I grew up in, I wouldn't still call Boston home. Or one day when I am old and my parents are no longer with me, maybe I wont call it home anymore. But right now, it is "Home" and I think it will forever be...
But a funny thing happened. I moved from Arizona to Charlotte and suddenly when I talk about Arizona... you guessed it... I call it HOME!!! So now I have TWO homes. Boston and Arizona. So what made this place that I never called Home in the 10 years I lived there, suddenly home to me?? I have realized lately home truly IS where your heart is. But you leave pieces of your heart in many places. Some of my heart is with the love I left behind there. The people places and things that we met and experienced there. The friends and loved ones waiting for us to return and visit. Sometimes it takes moving to realize how lucky you were to have those things. It takes flying the nest for you to realize that nest will always be there for you to fondly remember and to visit when you miss it. There will always be couches and bedrooms willing and ready to take us in when we come visit. There will be open arms there to greet us. There will be warm smiling faces and hugs and genuine happiness to reminisce and reflect. To tell old stories and belly laugh till your cheeks hurt. That sure sounds like going home to me...
And after writing this blog post I searched for a quote I could include and this one popped up. I think it summarizes what I wrote above just perfectly!
No comments:
Post a Comment