Coming home

(A long day of cycling, walking, and planting today left me mentally and physically exhausted by story-time. I wasn't thrilled by the StoryADay.org prompt to write to a Wikipedia piece, and I thought it might be a good idea to take a day off from stories related to my book mss. So I decided to write a piece about my first few hours in Saratoga Springs, NY, using memories triggered by Frank McCourt's excerpt from Angela's Ashes that I had read yesterday. Here goes.)


It's Saturday, April 10, 2010. We arrive in Saratoga Springs after driving all night, probably around 1 or 2 p.m. Four cats have traveled with us patiently all the way from Seattle. We had stopped for one night in Minneapolis, where Jim's parents lived, and for two nights in Muncie, where my parents lived. In Muncie, we unpacked the rental car that had brought us through the Midwest from Seattle, and returned it at an Anderson dealer. We transferred our belongings into a Buick LeSabre that my father had gifted to us, and left Muncie at about 7 p.m., planning to drive through the night.
I managed to stay awake until we got to Pennsylvania at about 3 a.m. My husband woke me at sunrise.
"Hun, we're in New York," he said.
I opened my eyes and saw a huge rosy orb lighting the horizon over farm fields. It was 2010, and we were hardly pioneers or naive travelers. But still tears pricked my eyes. It was so beautiful. It felt like I had finally come home.

I am one of those people with a wandering itch. Before I was even ten months old, I had lived at three different addresses. By the time, I left my parent's home to go to college, the number of addresses had grown to eight. After college, my moves intensified as I wandered from Chicago to southern Illinois, Texas, northeastern Pennsylvania, Kansas City, Seattle, Hawai'i, and back again to Seattle. I accumulated phone numbers and addresses, along the way. By 2010, I was preparing to move to my thirty-ninth address.
It was a rental apartment that we had decided to take, sight unseen. A Saratoga Springs real estate agent had toured the place, sent us photographs, and negotiated the transactions. She had called it a darling place that would be perfect for us and our kitties. The dean at the college that had hired me drove by and said it looked charming but a little shabby. We had put a house that I had owned with an ex-partner for sixteen years in Seattle on the market just before I left. We were moving to Saratoga with fifty-two suitcases and boxes, most of them containing bicycles, books, clothes, and cookware. Our bed was a comforter and two blankets over a sleeping bag and a yoga mat. We figured we would buy a different place after the house in Seattle sold and could put up with pretty much anything for a few months. After all, hadn't we both lived in Hawai'i, where people often subsist by living in the crawl spaces underneath people's homes or in vans parked by the beach or on the beach itself?

"Welcome to your new home."
The words came from the property manager, a heavy-lidded, thick-lipped man with a suspicious manner about him. Years later, we would find out that he talked trash at the bars on Caroline Street about my husband. Today, he didn't seem particularly eager to give us a warm welcome.
He showed us the place. It seemed nice, but somehow a little off. A large front room filled with windows, a kitchen, and two rooms on the side. The kitchen contained a stacked front-loader washer and dryer and led off to a bathroom and a back room. From the back room was a deck. It seemed like a lot of space. It had hard-wood floors, a feel of the Victorian era in its filigree and style. I remarked that I had always wanted to live in a place like this, at least for awhile. And I always had. Now that I was here, however, something seemed awry.

We let the cats out of their carriers, and let them sniff their way through the apartment. Exhausted from the trip, I unrolled the sleeping bag on the hard-wood floors in the back and tried to convince Jim to take a nap. I don't think he slept, but I did for a few hours. As I slept, I kept hearing noises. Pounding on the ceilings, noise from the street outside. We were in a town of less than 30,000, but it felt more urban than any other place where I had lived in my life, including the very urban inner-city community of my former neighborhood in Seattle, including the densely packed, high-rise dominated community of Makiki in Honolulu. I tried to convince myself that I had come to the right place, that this was home.