Westward Expansion

My sister gave me this bumper sticker a few years ago, which I put in a drawer and forgot to put on our car. I got it out the other day and realized that the back reads, "Follow your heart. It will lead you home." Turns out its true!

So, as it turns out, my last several sentimental posts about Boston and our adventures in NE do, in fact, have a common purpose which is not to eternally and sap-tasitcally memorialize my life here: it is to help me say goodbye to it. Because we are headed home.

A few months ago, the painful reality that my little church was not going to be able to pay me much longer came into specific relief. And so I started searching around for something else. I was not imagining that I would be able to find an opening in the particular part of the world most appealing to me (Oregon), but, as it were, that is exactly what I found. And it worked out. And we're going.

And thus the reason I've been so delinquent in posting these past few weeks is not because nothing erratic or hilarious has happened (believe me, it has), but because I haven't had time to write about it amidst goodbye saying, box packing, farewell letter writing, condo renting, wall spackling, furniture taking-aparting and generally freaking out. Because, surprisingly, it turns out that even doing the thing you really want to do can be scary as S**T.

We've always said that we were moving back to Oregon. And we've always dreamed about the days when we would get to live amongst the mountains and neo-hippies again and have a garden to grow tomatoes and actually see our families and friends at regular intervals and have organic, fair-trade, fresh-roasted coffee delivered to our door via bike messenger.  But it so happens that when your dreams become reality, things are more complex than your imagination would have made it seem.

This is the right thing for us, and we are so grateful for this opportunity. But it is more complicated than I ever thought it would be to say goodbye. Because this place is now a part of who I am. And I will miss it. I will miss my friends and my colleagues. I will miss my home and my neighborhood. I will miss the Indian food restaurant across the street and its constant provision of take-out. I will miss the snow (not that much, but maybe a little). I will miss my work and all the people there and how it and they have frustrated and fulfilled me in ways that I could not have imagined. I will miss not having a toaster. I will miss Shabbat dinner. I will really miss my book club.

Looking back, I realize that in many ways, this the place where I became an adult. It is the place where I prepared for and entered my career. It is the place where I feel I fully and truly lived into my role as a partner to Mr. L (we've now lived here 5/7 of the time we've been married, which is a lot proportionally.) It is the place where we created our own unique family traditions and made friends who had only known us together. It was the place where we did things on our own and found out that we're fairly capable people.

So in saying goodbye to this place, I feel I'm saying goodbye to all that. But I am already starting to realize that there are great things ahead, too, and other stages of life that will be just as transformative and fulfilling and frustrating and exciting.

We just bought and shipped my nephew his first ever bike, a birthday gift.* And we'll get to see him ride it soon. And we'll get to be there for many milestones after that. And there is something giddily happy about that for me. Also, I hear the coffee is great out there.



*Brother-in-law: If you are reading this, we are SORRY that you will be the one who has to assemble the bike, which I am afraid may have come in 24,000 pieces. Clearly we did not fully think through the awesomest-long-distance-aunt-and-uncle-in-the-world plan enough to realize it came with a mandatory burdening-parents-who-are-already-busy-doing-other-stuff-with-putting-bikes-together-at-midnight addendum. We will buy you a bottle of gin as soon as we arrive to make up for this oversight.