Journey to Home

The Virtual Tea House has a writing challenge to explore where home is to you.  http://virtualteahouse.com/blogs/beth/archive/2008/05/18/where-s-home.aspx Beth writes in her email:”It seems, at first blush, to be a simple writing exercise, but the ‘contest’ is really about helping us to explore the sacred spaces where we feel roots…connections….and the comfort that sustains us to take on life’s challenges.” Wow! That’s a big order and something I have been contemplating since she issued the challenge. Is home a physical place, a spiritual place, is it family, is it my husbands arms, is it heaven, is it my home state, my adopted state, or a mixture of all of the above? I think for me it is a mixture with the changes in life requiring me to be flexible and to keep home as more of a spiritual center than a physical location. Nevertheless, I live in a human body and live here on earth. My personality likes to be planted and for life to have a sense of continuity to it. As I pondered it all, I finally sat down and wrote my “journey to home”.

This summer marks our 20th year anniversary of moving across the country and resettling in another area. I was only 29 when my husband and I packed up our three little children and locked the doors on the home we had lovingly built together in the country. We said the most painful goodbye you can imagine to our families, and moved from Oklahoma to Washington state. When I was 12 I had stayed with friends for a month in Seattle and had fallen in love with the countryside.  I had never been able to let the memories of that region go, and at times would dream of it.  I would wake up with the clearest remembrances of the forests and the mountains, and even the smell of the woods.  I would look out on the scrub oaks surrounding our acreage and ponder why I continued dreaming about a place I only visited one time.

When my husband lost his job in Oklahoma, we realized we were going to have to make a decision. Either scratch out an existence where we were in a depressed economy, or start over somewhere else where he could get a good job to support our family. I thought of Washington, and we began to send resumes to company’s in that region. When he found one, I was excited to move, and yet scared. We would be moving from a large home in the country to an apartment. Housing was so much higher in Washington, that we wondered if we would ever recover financially. In looking back, I realize we had no idea of the sacrifice moving away from extended family would require of us in the years that followed.  When it all was said and done, we were 2,000 miles from anyone we knew, and we were starting over again with no resources except a job and faith that this was the road we were to take in our journey.

One of the hardest things we encountered was the cultural differences. Our accents labeled us as being transplants. People would actually turn and look at us as we talked among ourselves in a store. The children quickly lost their accents, my husband and I will probably carry a faint accent for the rest of our lives. We also had different values than the community around us. We moved from the Bible belt to the most un-churched state in the nation. People were open and friendly in Oklahoma, people tended to be more reserved in the northwest. It wasn’t long before as much as I loved the mountains, every ounce of my being longed for Oklahoma. I missed my mother, I would think I saw my brother walking on the road and then realize there was no way that could be possible. At times I would be driving along in the car and simply find myself crying. It was a hard difficult time for me, yet it was during that time I began to really grow up. Being so far from extended family, I had the opportunity to become who I was, not who they wanted me to be. As a couple we began to realize we were a unit, an independent family, and that strengthened us. We loved the outdoors, and every weekend we piled the children into the station wagon and set off for an adventure. One day at time, this land became more than a dream, it became my home.

Sometimes I fly out of state and when I fly back to Seattle, I come off the plane and smell the damp sea air and feel the cool misty rain. I take a deep breath and think, “Oh, it’s so good to be home again”. There is a saying that you never really leave a place you love, you take a part of it with you, and leave a part of yourself behind. I feel that way as well. There is a part of me that is rooted in the plains of Oklahoma. That part of me speaks with a sweet drawl, likes life slow and simple, has old fashioned values and ideas. Yet there is a part of me that loves the northwest. The free spirits that reside here, the earth conscious environment, the intellectuals that seems to gravitate to this place. And always, the mountains, trees, and water that surround me every day. Home for me is a mixture of the places I have loved, and have been planted in. Perhaps like the rose that gets divided and transplanted, part of me remains there, and part of me is here, blooming in two places. The dividing was painful and at times I wasn’t sure I would live through it, but my soul continues to bloom.