Monday, April 16, 2012

Stick in the Mud

I watched our neighbors leave this morning, the moving van had loaded their belongings a few days ago and they remained to clean up and attend to last few things before closing a chapter in their lives. They lived next door for two or three years, while going to grad school, like so many in this town - including Mike and I. We had neighborly conversations over the fence without much more socializing beyond me leaving them tomatoes and zucchini in the summers and sidewalk chats on our way inside our respective homes. Winter and summer they would stand on their back porch for a smoke – respectful of their landlord’s ban on indoor tobacco use. On the weekends, they would sit on the steps talking to their relatives on cell phones. Iowa City had grown on the young woman and she was reluctant to leave, but her guy had landed a job in Chicago so they would be transitioning to city life. They will miss this town and will likely return to visit and wonder what their life would have been like if they had stayed on. Mike and I opted to remain. Our coming here was a move away from our homes on the west coast and - as Mike put it - really when ‘our’ life had begun - not our childhood growing up at home or close by - but a separate life far away and of our own making. We no longer went 'home' for holidays - were were already there. Our steps were tentative and cautious, we are toe-dippers - not ready to fling ourselves headlong into unknown waters - but testing, testing, wading in, looking back at the shore a few times, all the while edging our way out into deeper waters. This is our adventure and if we seem sedentary, it is because we are wrapped up in our lives. We miss our home shore, our distant and departed loved ones, but we are contented with our choice. My Mom called me a ‘stick in the mud’, because I wasn’t on the move, didn’t have her restless nature, her WANDERLUST. But I am as much a product of my Dad as of her, with his need to work and build. Dad wasn’t a traveler, though his work took him far away at times. He didn’t need a change of outward scenery, because the land inside was always on the move. My path too leads inward, its destination whatever project is at hand. My friends are busy going here and there, they ask me what my plans are for the summer – meaning where am I going and what I will be doing. They eye me piteously when I smile and say I will be here, working and weeding my garden, drawing and reading books and walking around my neighborhood. Yes, I am a stick in the mud; my journey hidden from view, invisibly stretching far below the surface.

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