Shall we pack the light-up squirrel?

Oh my, how much time has passed since my last posting! Is that me, in the picture, you ask? Why yes, it is, and you know, I still own that outfit in an adult size and I wear it regularly in Austin with fuzzy socks.

Many things have passed since I last wrote, including my adoring and attempting to educate a new group of teens at work, meeting a wonderful man and trying to be good at relationships (though I fear I still need to consult H quite regularly), but today I want to focus on something else, something I have wept over multiple times and ultimately, thanks to chocolate and wine, have come to accept.

Let me start by saying that I am the product of too much love, snuggling and stability, and therefore fully can blame my parents for my inability to cope with change. So, naturally, when they began to tell me that the house I grew up in, was brought home to at one day old, was going to be sold in their newfound dream to move to the Rocky Mountains near my sister, I was obstinate. Let's be honest, I was a first-world brat (much more destructive than the other third-world brat, who merely sasses mothers over an empty pot of beans). My sister has been calling me, clucking with joy that our parents would be near her soon, in Denver, when all I could think of were the orchards I ran to for all those years. I thought of how my Dad always built these pungent, blazing fires and would let the cold in while he carried in wood from our fallen walnut trees out back, the same ones that I swung from for hundreds of hours dreaming I could indeed fly.  I could only think that, without my house and parents in Chico, I actually had no home at all.

  Maya Angelou once wrote, "The ache for home lives in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned." I have felt this ache, in Europe, South America, Asia and over the four collegiate years I spent terrified of snow and leaving people behind. I grew tired of being questioned abroad, was I too much a feminist, or a disgrace to the whole movement? Was I the innocent girl I thought I was or had I grown cynical and broken? Why couldn't I love Anne Sexton as much as everyone else I was around?

While my sister seems, overall, less sentimental from our hometown, I remain so enraptured in it that I find myself dreaming of February almond blossoms even whilst bathing in the warm waters of the Gulf of Thailand. I ache for the safety of a town where I go to a dentist that has my sophomore dance pictures in a manila folder with my name on it and who is named Dr. Moon and still offers toys out of a plastic treasure chest. I love to weave the streets seeing my old, dilapidated junior high a mere block away from the large coniferous trees that blanket my brick high school. And, naturally, even more than the places, are the people. If my parents leave, I will have to say goodbye to Christmas Day-Night beers with my high school friends, and music festivals in the mountains, and crying with my dear ones over tragedy and beauty in equal measure with wine on a couch no one quite knows the origin of. 

How does one let go of their hometown, without at the same time letting go of their childhood?

I often feel more afflicted with this problem than others. Perhaps it is because I grew up in one house only, or perhaps, as I fear, I am just more sentimental and emotional than potentially 93% of the rest of the world. I must say that over Christmas break, my guy friends gave me some of their opinions about something in my personal life that I was not exactly thrilled to hear, and I found myself mentally doing a very vulgar 'suck it' hand gesture in my mind at them, thinking it is time to move on from this place anyhow. I am 26 years old, how much longer must I hold onto the past? I am no longer that little awkward teen that gets green beans in her braces or belts the soundtrack to One Tree Hill before chemistry class. I know now, that when guys buy me vodka, especially if it's a heinous strawberry or other fruit flavor, they probably want to sleep with me, not discuss the essay portion of college applications. I also dress better now, thank goodness I said goodbye to black and hot pink era, and have learned to flatten my fro with product and 410 degree hair wands. I have left, come back, and left again, in a way that marked me so I know longer can gracefully fall into the mold this town had constructed for me. 

I suppose the truth is, I don't know where my life will go. I have family spread out all over the country and I don't know why I chose Texas, or if I'm feeling spiritual, Texas chose me, and it scares the hell out of me to not have a permanent address. I am floating. I am 26 and still floating and while I love to be free I am terrified I will never touch back down for any length of time. I can not decide where I am supposed to be, who I am supposed to be with, or what I am meant to do (though teaching does feel pretty close to what they say 'passion' is). I like being the girl that goes away and comes back, but I can't handle when those same people holding 'Welcome Home' posters in SFO are the same ones telling me they can no longer anchor my existence.


And it took my mother, my father, a sick uncle and a slipping grandmother, to show me that I am too old to hold on to these things. For they are, as I said, just things. A house is a sanctuary, yes, but it is also just carpet and dry wall, while my family is my whole life. I stripped my room, the closet, the drawers, dividing into trash, Goodwill, and boxes to take out east, because at some point, I have to accept that my Chico may not be where I will end up. I may not have a magical wedding in the orchards, with hanging white lights and candles and the Railflowers sweeping us all into a harmonic trance,  it may just be a lovely little town in which I once lived. 

"I've always wanted a house that faced the mountains," my mother said, thirteen days ago, to no one in particular. 
She was staring at something I could not see, and I knew then, that she had dreams, too. So often this family chooses to live my dreams, encourage me, send me off, edit my writing in a circle with pen tips in their studious mouths, but it's time for her now. My mother deserves that house, that faces the mountains, where she can live with my father alone for the first time in over thirty years. I may be selfish and certainly indulgent, but I do love, and my love for her ended up being enough to break me of my most viscous and consuming habit: dreaming of what once was. 

I will return once more, to Chico, in March. The flowers will taunt me with blooms and surely the grass will hold that level of green that made Ireland seem familiar, and I will jog once more in the orchards (breathing harder than I'd like and wondering why people run marathons without their inner thighs bleeding). I will strip the walls of our pictures, the tables of our sacred artifacts, and then I will say goodbye to Autumnwood Ct. the way they say adults are supposed to do, for we may place childish games still but we are no longer children.

I wonder if they will pack the light-up squirrel, purchased out of Publisher's Clearing house by my senile blessed grandmother (the same year my brother-in-law got a lavender scented purple shoe rack). It is an ugly plastic device that glows at night ominously, but it has become part of the loveable symbol of the eccentricity of my family. And yet, I hope it stays in Chico. Perhaps it will stay on the rickety bench built thirty-one years ago, or be thrown away with some other Christmas gifts secretly tossed away in the barefoot dark hours. Sometimes you have to open that black silky garbage bag and start fresh, because the past can grow cumbersome, and I want nothing more than my family to feel that magnificent lightness in a new state, where the only thing that glows is the sun as it droops it's red body down behind the mountains where my mom sits waiting, and watching, from her mountain-view home.