It’s been ten months since we left Texas for the Pacific Northwest, a place I had wanted to move to since I first visited in 1999.  I was captivated by the giant trees and the way the clouds clung to the mountainsides, and the weather was exquisite to me.  We immediately resolved to one day move to this part of the country, reaffirming that resolve in 2011 following an intense and deadly heat wave that scorched local forests with brushfires.  I swore I’d never spend another summer somewhere that it reached nearly 115F on my back porch almost every day for more than three months.

Fast forward 23 years from our first visit to the Northwest, and we were literally driven from our home by the rising popularity, and therefore cost, of the city we were living in.  Those weren’t the only reasons we left.  We actually made a spreadsheet of about a dozen different important points with the pros and cons of leaving, and it made far more sense in every single area to leave than it did to stay.  More importantly, it made far more sense to move to where we did.  Basically, our people were no longer in Texas: they were here.

Moving is hard no matter what, and even more so when you uproot your entire life, reduce your belongings by at least half, and move more than 2200 miles across the country with your entire family and four cats.  It’s a huge adjustment, and more than a few times I wondered if we hadn’t made a mistake.  As time went by, it was clear that we hadn’t.  In fact, we got out just in time, having used our entire savings to make the move, savings that were quickly dwindling due to the rising cost of living where we did.  If we hadn’t left when we did, we’d be stuck there forever while being simultaneously forced to abandon anything there that made us happy.  For that reason alone, it was a good move.

We’ve been so much happier here than we were in Texas.  We spent our first months here doing things we could never do there.  While there is natural beauty in that state, it’s often only accessible by going on a long, very boring drive, especially if you don’t want to deal with large numbers of people.  We dreamed of going on out-of-state road trips that our budget wouldn’t accommodate, in part because we lived in the dead center of the state where it takes at least ten hours just to cross the border, in any direction.  Even driving to the beach was an 8-hour round trip.

Oregon is tiny in comparison, and so jam-packed with outdoor adventure just a relatively short drive from where we live that we did more in four months than we had done in the previous twenty years.  We visited state and national parks, went to the beach a few times, and hiked numerous trails, some of which were just a short drive away.  My hiking app tells me there are about 150 places within an hour’s drive for me to visit.

Still, despite being surrounded by all this natural beauty and actually having the ability to appreciate it, I find myself unable to really register that this is now my home.  Part of me still feels like I’m on some kind of extended vacation and that someday I’ll have to pack it all up and go back to Texas.  I can’t let myself settle, and I’m fairly sure I know why.

We moved a lot when I was a child.  I made my first transcontinental move when I was three months old when my parents moved from San Francisco to Detroit.  We lived in several apartments in the suburbs of that city before moving to Houston when I was nine, yet another long move, one that required me to reduce all of my childhood belongings to a single cardboard box.  Once in Houston, our family again moved several times before I was rather rudely (and wrongfully) kicked out when I was 17, at which point I moved in with my boyfriend and his family.  The next several years of my life would see me move a number of times, including to leave Houston for Austin.  By the time I met my husband and we moved into our own place together when I was 25, I calculated that I had moved once for every year of my life.

Psychologists list moving as one of the top most stressful things a person can go through, right up there with death, divorce, and changing jobs.  It should come as no surprise to me that I’m still adjusting to such a huge life change, one that occurred amidst other major changes in my life (hitting menopause, being diagnosed diabetic).  It should also come as no surprise that I can’t let myself settle: I have a lifetime of being constantly uprooted under my belt.  The longest I’ve lived anywhere was 18 years, in the second house my husband and I got together.  After that we moved elsewhere in the city and stayed for 5 years before finally moving to the Northwest.

Every single time I have moved, it has taken me a very long time to really own the fact that I live in a new place, especially the house we lived in for 18 years.  It was about five years before I would allow myself to garden, part of me being sure that the instant I put any work into the yard, I would have to abandon it.  After bringing my nephew to live with us, that house became too small.  We rented the next house with the intent of one day buying it, but the real estate boom in our city entire precluded that, yet again dashing my hopes of one day owning a home I could keep and call my own.

We’re relatively secure now.  We’re still renters, but we should be able to stay in our current house for at least another year and a half, something that simultaneously makes me happy and anxious.  We love where we’re at now, but we’re also aware of the vagaries of our greed-driven economy.  That plus my long-standing anxieties regarding moving are keeping me from really registering that this is where we live and where we’ll continue to live, generally speaking.  I cannot imagine myself living anywhere else now that I’m here.

And yet, even on mornings like this one, when fresh snowfall lies upon the Douglas firs on the mountain behind our neighborhood, it still won’t sink in that this is my home now.  I wish it would.  I wish I could relax into just being here.  It’s not that I don’t love it here, I do.  Our new city is much smaller than the one we left, which suits me fine.  The traffic is much lighter, people are more polite and friendly, and it’s easy to get to things I need.  If I want a countryside drive on twisty roads, it’s just a short jaunt out of town into pastoral fields filled with happy cows and horses, something I take advantage of frequently.

Maybe it’s because it’s so different, because it is.  Maybe it’s because it took us so long to get here that part of me doesn’t believe we actually managed to do it.  Maybe it’s because we’re not fully moved in yet: we still lack several crucial pieces of furniture (like a couch) and a lot of our important personal stuff is still in boxes.  Given our financial situation, I have no freaking clue when any of that is going to be remedied.  Maybe that’s also keeping me from feeling settled.

I’m sure it also has something to do with the phase of life I’m in.  I’m still in the midst of a major life transition that has me literally transforming from one person into another.  I’m leaving an old life full of pain behind me and trying to build a new one, and that’s difficult to do when I feel like I’m still on shaky ground.  How am I supposed to put down roots when the foundation of my life keeps changing?  I’m a gardener, I know how plants thrive, and they do not thrive by being constantly uprooted and moved from one place to another, nor will a seedling grow if its soil keeps getting disturbed.  I feel like a young seedling that keeps getting hit by early freezes and has to keep regrowing.

However, plants that grow under such conditions either die, or eventually become stronger due to the forces they’re put under.  They may not be the tallest or the biggest or the prettiest plant, but they’ll have a stronger stem and deeper roots than the others and will be more likely to survive conditions that take out weaker plants, even if they are bigger and lovelier.

I’m not sure how to apply this metaphor to my current life since I feel like a lot of what’s keeping me from being present in this new place is due to external factors that I have no control over.  I have a chronic health issue and no useful work history that would allow me to work to offset our financial problems which are preventing us from fully settling physically and taking care of normal life issues that arise.  This is a source of constant frustration and even rage, because my husband makes enough money that we should be getting by just fine, but thanks to the greedy fucks that run the world, it isn’t.

I think I’m just tired of living in survival mode, which I’ve done pretty much since birth, thanks to my family and our sick society.  I’d really like to stop.  Then perhaps the constant thrum of fear that vibrates in my soul would go away, and I’d be able to finally accept that I’m Home, at last.