figure out where i want to live

we want to move

We’ve been seriously looking into moving to the Charlotte suburbs. We like the weather, the affordable housing, the proximity to a city and the beach, and we have a couple friends there.

Our lease is up in April, and we’re trying to figure out if we can afford to pick up and leave that quickly. As much as I’d like to buy a house I think we’d have to move into an apartment for a year so we can save up some money. The only way we’d be able to avoid that is if we borrowed a whole lot of money (which isn’t completely out of the question).

I think we’re gonna do some more online research then plan an extended visit and tour the city. I’ve been there once and really liked it. I just think we need a change.

Any comments or suggestions?

I have been in Boston for 6 years and don’t think it’s where i want to be long-term. I can’t afford a home here. I hate the weather. I despise the traffic. The 3 main contenders at this point are North Carolina, San Diego or the Bay area.

NC- Warm, cheap, access to big city (Charlotte), some friends nearby.
Cons. It’s in the south. Could be too hot. Questions about job market.

San Diego- favorite weather in the world. friend is moving there soon. closer to my brother. cheaper than Boston. less traffic than Boston.
Cons. don’t know many people there. not as cheap as other places. really far from rest of family. long move.

Bay area. pros. job market is great. closer to brother. good friend of mine may be moving there. possible connections to other friends. great cities.
cons. expensive. traffic. no real network of people yet. scary.

but i think at 3 years and running seattle wins. i think.

Don’t even know where to begin…

I want to live in PA for the rest of my life. specifically the poconos.

The first time: one month past my 18th birthday. Had never ever before felt at home; you know, like, this is it. Happened onto/into a small Ozark Mountain town. Noted in my diary that day, “Not going to go West. Found a home. About time. Wow!”

I stayed (other than brief travels) for thirty-three years.

Would probably still be there had not my husband died suddenly… forced to reinvent my life. Tried to stay where I was for awhile, but it just didn’t fit (though I didn’t, and don’t, know for sure, if anywhere will again fit, like life with him, in that place, did).

But staying there I ran into all the “we” places at every turn, at every moment. Plus, there was the increasingly unpleasant “Founder’s Syndrome” thing I have written about elsewhere here (do a search here on Found a non-profit organization and you will find it).

Finally, against my will, kicking and screaming, I had to admit to myself that I couldn’t stay where I was any longer, literally or figuratively. I desperately wanted my old life back. But having it in part was not having it at all. This was, in toto, one of the hardest… no, THE hardest (when you include his death) that I have ever, ever had to make in my life.

Given the alternatives available: Better to start over.

I was fortunate in that I did have a starting-over point that did have some connection to my roots, an option many do not have… The summer home in which my family had dwelt part of each July and August when I was a kid, the only place in my past (before my little Ozark town) that had ever felt right to me… this home was about to be sold.

I bought it. With a deep breath. (Virtually ALL my resources went, and still go into, this act… which I must say was either brave or foolhardy or both).

Since I am an older tree I don’t transplant as quickly as I did when I was an 18-year-old sapling.

But slowly, slowly I am sinking my roots in here, more and more deeply.

Just like a person can have a new love late in life, but it will and can never be the same as that first one, with whom one walked through so many “firsts” and the years and experiences of growing up, so one can make a new life and new home, both by finding it, that is actively and consciously moving towards it, and more passively … waiting for it to be revealed (sometimes these two things have to be done/not done at the same time).

The new place and the life that goes with it, the life you create there, will never be and can never be like the first, with that organic, natural intimacy of time’s passage, when you’re too young to really get that time IS passing and that you and the place and the partner and the people in that place are by degrees creating each other.

The second time, with a place as with a person, you don’t fall in love, you walk into love.

So I am, at least I like to think I am, walking into love with this, my second real home, in the physical sense, on this lovely and changing, spinning earth.

(The real home, the only still place, is of course not physical at all.)

Image: hearts and broken hearts and lots of energy in creating and recreating, over and over.

Going to move to Portland, Oregon as soon as I can do so.

some kind of poll for this, because honestly? i’m nowhere close to being sold on another location. i’m not even sure that i want to stay in abq long enough to finish my ma. i have a sneaking suspicion that when my undergrad is finally finished, i’ll run screaming for a large body of water.

since i’m super homesick for a country i only spent a month in, this has to be taken with large iceberg size hunks of salt, but i’ve been thinking about it. all this racism i heard SOOOO much about before i went to ireland? i saw none of it. and that’s not wishful thinking.

i roamed pretty far and wide too. i don’t doubt that it’s there, but i was given the impression that i’d be knifed or at the very least heckled by xenophobic weirdos. hell that didn’t happen until i was waiting for my ride at newark international.

and ireland is so beautiful. and isn’t a place that got moi, grey goose martini girl, to drink beer by the liter a magical one? and i’m going to be a midwife. catholic country? job security for LIFE. sounds better and better by the day.