Every year I wonder if I want to write a post acknowledging the day I moved into the nest. I mean - I live here now. But this year I realized it was the year I finally settled in. The actual first year I could hardly believe that I was going to live in this beautiful place I remember the first time I left to visit the mommie in NC when I came back the nest didn't even smell like me yet. I still felt like it was temporary. Then the mommie arrived and everything became about her. This was the first year in which it was about having an ordinary daily life.
There have been a few small changes in the nest. The driver series is now up. There's a new chair in the library and a matching ottoman. But things are pretty much settled. I experimented with some furniture moving but ... nothing really works as well as the first arrangement.
I am still enamored with the nest. I still sit and look around loving it and feeling gratitude.
I am still ambivalent about Hood River but I still love things about it. I love the way the seasons changing looks outside the window by my desk. I love the places where people remember me. I love the times when it feels like a small town. I don't love the lack of diversity. I don't love the clusters of people who think they're part of an elite. (Oh they are here.) I don't love the way being a small town is used as an excuse to not fix things or provide good service.
I swim four mornings a week, five when I'm lucky. I get a massage twice a month, which might sound luxurious but it's really more like physical therapy. It can be painful but I feel like it helps me to keep moving. I have all the people - a GP who I trust, a hair person, a dentist, an eye doctor, favorite restaurants, a few good friends. All the people you need to take care of yourself.
I don't get out much and that bugs me but I always have a book.
Grief still knocks me down at random weird moments. I miss the mommie. Me living here and the end of her life are eternally wedded.
Living here wasn't an active choice. It just sort of happened. I still squirm from time to time wondering if I should move somewhere else. But where?
It took five years to emotionally inhabit the nest. Five seems like a lot and it also feels like not that long.
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