Things My Husband Says

Hey there, blog. Long time no see. It turns out that living with my husband diminishes the need I feel to write a blog whose primary purpose had been communicating with/entertaining him. Sorry.

Aaanyway… I do have some stuff that I think I should start writing about, as part of my general life process. Let’s have a list, shall we?

• Bicycling. Despite the fact that Sexy Husband is the primary driving force behind me getting on a bike and owning down on that shit, I’m starting to feel a little bad for interrupting his video game playing with a thousand constant tiny biking victories. (That may be a little sarcasm.) I am pretty proud of myself, and I think I should share it here, so the real people in my life don’t start getting burnt out on hearing about it.
• Meditation. I’ve been going to a Shambhala meditation approximately weekly, and really enjoying it. I think I need to be more diligent about meditating at home, and expanding the usefulness of that practice in my life. I still feel uncertain about how that should progress, and I think some navel-gazing writing about it may help.
• Making Things. My New Year’s resolution was to make more things. I have had some mixed success with this overall, I think. I don’t want this to become a knitting blog, because I am a super lazy and sporadic knitter these days, but I should be better about telling you (me) about what I’m knitting, and keeping track of the many things I am fermenting and baking.
• Life stuff. This is a broad category. When I sat down today, it was largely due to a couple of interactions we’ve had with friends this week. I wanted to write about the nature of friendship as an adult, and do a little musing on relationships and whatnot. I’m not going to do that right this moment, but I want to do more of that. Life at 30 has a lot more interesting developments in that realm than I would have imagined.
• Taking pictures of things. This is not actually something I should write about, it’s just something I should be doing. We’ll see.

Things I won’t be blogging about here, at least much: Pie. Pie has its own blog now, which I am currently actively procrastinating, in part because I can’t find the card reader thingy, so I can’t move the pictures I did take from the camera to the computer.

It looks like I’m heading into an extraordinarily busy time in my life, but I’m trying to embrace the idea that busy people are more effective at getting stuff done. The reality is that I’m going to have to get a lot better about using my calendar, which is a thing I HATE. Meh. Oh well. Onward, forward soldiers, as we say in this house!

I don’t really talk about it much, but I grew up in a really small town. Small like 800 people. Smaller than most people can imagine. It was too small for me to be me. It’s hard to find yourself when everyone you know has known you since birth, you know? I don’t remember ever feeling like I fit there, and knew from a really young age that I needed to get away. So, when I went to college, I really went. I moved 1500 miles away, to the place that I knew I belonged, even before I had been there: the Pacific Northwest. Hello, trees and seasons; goodbye, lonesome high desert. And I never looked back (OK, kinda). For a while, my parents still lived there, and I would visit when my school closed the dorms, but it had already changed, and so had I. Eventually, the rest of my family left, and I was left with no obligation to ever return, which was perfect for me.

Kinda.

Even though it was the locus of all my childhood unhappiness, I still have this lingering fascination with the place. I’ve replaced my desire to leave with a need to hear the gossip, which inevitably bring back the same feelings of alienation that I felt while I was living there. Why do I do that to myself?

For years, I had no contact with anyone from that part of my life. That was before Facebook. Now, one by one, the people I grew up with are coming back into my life, and my efforts to keep that part of my past at bay are crumbling. It’s been really weird to watch the way they come back, actually. The first person to friend me was someone who never a friend when we were young. The first time I saw her name again I didn’t recognize it. Why would she want to be friends with me? I debated ignoring her, returning some of that childhood unkindness back to her, but ultimately let her be my Facebook friend. The past is the past, after all. And she was always a good source of gossip (about me, back then). That was almost a year ago, and since then, most of the people from my clique (though we were anything but a clique) have found me. I get a peek into their lives, their kids, the ways that we’ve grown apart, and the ways that we haven’t. I enjoy it, actually, though it doesn’t make me want to go back.

Then I read an article this month, about the drug war and the Minute Men, and felt inexplicable ire over the way outsiders have always looked at that town. I’m sure it hasn’t always been that way, but it was definitely true in my childhood and teen years. The landscape is beautiful, the economy always looks like it could use a boost, and something about it seems to call out to people looking to escape, or to ‘save’ a place. But it’s not the place that they imagine it to be. It’s not some kind of Shangri-La, a perfect oasis hidden away in the mountains. It’s a small town, just like every other small town. It has some nice qualities, and some shitty ones. Seeing that treatment of it in a national publication left my heart a little broken.

So, after waking up with some ennui this morning, I decided to Google Map it, for reasons that I can’t fully explain. Maybe it helps me keep my perspective, seeing how far it is from anything, and how small. Except that it turns out the Street View car had been there since the last time I looked at it. Despite my insistence, for 8 years now, that I’m never going back there, I went back there, at least a little. I stood outside my childhood home, and marveled at how the ivy has overtaken the north side. I saw the helicopter pad where they airlifted my friend’s brother after he shot himself on a dare. I wondered who was standing out in front of the place where I worked in high school. I looked for the haunted house we lived in, and was sad to find it replaced. Sad is a good adjective for the whole experience, actually. I never wanted to go back, and today I realized that I really can’t. I never expected that to make me feel sad.