Home again.....

Home again, ...and really not quite.

    Home for a week or so from my time in Colorado with the family.  What a best time!!  Just really what I needed and I could have stayed for another two weeks had I not been in anyone's way. Unless one is living in a big house with extra bedrooms for guest, its always a bit of a pain to have someone visit, but my people tolerated me.  Being with them really seemed like being home, no pretenses, cooking, long talks, movies, fires in the afternoon with lazy, soft snowflakes, and of course, dragons and balls and laughs.  That is the real me, surrounded by my kids and sisters.  Probably the reason that I never needed a lot of friends.  Especially as I grew older.

    My first husband led me on a nomad's existence after enticing me to leave the home that I had grown up in, at an early age of just eighteen.  I was not prepared for leaving my small town, there had been no discussion, no agreement.  I did what he needed to do.  So we traveled to the west, met people and lived an entirely different life than what I had imagined. We moved constantly.  Never in one place for long. He had been the first person who had told me he loved me-and wasn't the ex-boyfriend slash adopted brother of a best friend a great choice??  It changed everything, my type of people who surrounded me, my religion, and alienated my family, and most important my dad. 

    So, after many years and kids, a divorce, and another marriage to a man who loved me too....
his support to finish nursing school seemed like the best thing anyone had ever done for me.  Attainment of something I had wanted and should have done years before.  I ran and did everything for his business while I was in school, to do my part.  But after two years of my  practicing, he thought we should travel and I could be a "travel Nurse" who got contracts with hospitals for a few months at a time.  Go to California where he had lived before.  Seemed like an interesting idea.  I had never lived away from my girls, so I took a chance.  After almost nine years in California, and after not having traveled anywhere else during that time, I have come to love the parts of the state I've seen. The ocean is a marvel that I cannot believe I have lived without in my prior life.  Everything grows!  It's been a wonderful opportunity and it certainly has made my career as a Pediatric nurse.

    But I never meant to be away so long.  From home.  From my family.  They are understanding for many reasons, and I know why.  So many benefits from the jobs we have here have allowed a life that has come up to speed where it should be since stupid divorces and loosing so much.  So it has been good.  Education, jobs with prestige.  Ed would have been proud of his mouthy kid even seeing Stanford, not to mention being good enough to work there for so many years.  But he would not have said it.

   So, as we have been on the "home" theme lately, my friend and I, and you and I, and the many different aspects of our conception of home, I can tell you, that for myself, as a Cancer, home is paramount in my priorities.  Not the cute little house I live in now, and absolutely love.  (I told my husband that "it" was my friend the other day when he was worrying about me an my "only acquaintances" status. In other words, I have no friends here.) I am almost done with being here.  I plan to go back to family soon, give or take several months. He is wide-eyed, or looks away at the prospect. It will be a process.  Planning, saving, pre-qualifying.  I have never had much of a plan, living as I have, on the whim of other people.  But I have decided that it is time to step up and get with it, as my dear old Da used to say.  And I will.  It is the idea to be comfortable, be yourself, not the girl the other person want's you to be because he understands that you are SO different from himself.  So, I will. 

    Just a little place to paint, I have never done that, only owning one house in my life, for a very short time.  I recently dressed a large window in my bedroom with my beloved Pottery Barn linen drapes and a gorgeous pole.  It's the first time I have ever done that either.  It's not quite right, but I'll get it.  A place to garden, and be cozy.  I don't need much. A big kitchen that everyone will fit in, a fireplace, a good tub.  So, that's the plan.  My kids will have to see it before they believe it, I know.  Myself, I think I will have to see it too.  While I was home I saw a little rundown cabin for sale cheap about five house from my sister's house in the mountains.  And while it has never been my thought to live in the mountains again, I have dreamt about that little place in the snow for the last week, even while I have sat here on the Bay, looking at my wisteria blossoming.  I have mentally bulldozed it, kept it and decorated it, torn carpets and floors out, and thought about after all of these years how it would be to live a half dirt road block from my sister.  Watching the deer after I walked home for dinner at her Vegan place of residence.  Getting there and kicking my boots off and building up the fire as I see the sun setting behind Mount Evans.  Settling into my couch for a glass of wine and my book.  Home.

S