origins

I got a call the other day from the school district. A lady doing data entry for the entering kindergarten class wanted to know the official date that we moved to Pennsylvania and became residents. Most of the time, I can’t remember what I ate the day before, so of course I had to look this information up.

I unearthed old calendars and date books in the basement and found the exact date that we packed the last of our things into the car, the contents of our house having gone ahead of us in a van and our firstborn having gone ahead of us as well with her paternal grandmother and Auntie Joh on a plane at the tender age of seven months. May 2nd, 2004. Not quite four years ago.

I thought it was a lot longer than that, actually. For one thing, we have been telling people that we’ve been in business four ourselves for nearly five years. (Kind of like how the camera supposedly adds ten pounds- being in business for yourself adds at least a year to your memory and subtracts at least twice that much from the total years of your life.) On that date, we packed the remainder of our belongings (our important documents, duffel of clothes, and two cats) into the car and didn’t stop driving, with one major exception, for three days. We took turns at the wheel, David’s turns always being much longer than mine, until we were both insane with fatigue and emotion and possibly one of the more dangerous vehicles on the road. David actually lost his mind just east of Chicago, which we passed through during morning rush hour. He thought he was a character in Top Gun and that he was flying a fighter jet instead of driving a ’93 Altima. That’s when I took over and piloted us through to Pennsylvania.

What a strange place. I wonder, if you weren’t born here, do you ever really belong here?

When we were young and dating, I would visit for the summer and live with David’s family in Delaware. I considered the ugly highways, dingy malls, and massive business complexes I encountered to represent the small sate, and I pronounced Delaware to be “the armpit of America.” I decided years before I needed to that if we lived on the East Coast after we got married, it would be in Lancaster, for sure.

David grew up in Lancaster. His family moved from Minnesota when he was about to enter junior high. While I lived with his family, we went back to Lancaster often to visit friends. It was green, and quaint, and even at just the right moment of the evening when the sun was setting over the farms on the hills, Lancaster was magical. I likened it to the Shire, where Tolkien’s beloved hobbits lived in Middle Earth. I still think there is something about the place that makes it seem like it is from a different time- possibly the prevalent Amish and Mennonite cultures here that give a nod to the modern world as it drives by. There is a sense that time doesn’t have that much of a stronghold here.

I’m just trying to make sense of why I have let four years go by without getting over a feeling of being a fish out of water. How much of that is due to the culture of a place, one that I do not identify with much at all, and how much of that is my own fault, a “grass is always greener” syndrome.

Washington is the Evergreen state, actually. Ironically. It’s literally green all the time there, due to the rain and the pleasant, temperate climate that is never really too hot or too cold (well, people who live there think it gets plenty hot and mighty cold!)

I was sure about my decision that May. I had been waiting for the moment in our marriage when I would be called upon to choose, and I had already prepared myself. Not because of a lack of love for my own family, but because of David’s special closeness with his, I knew we would eventually move back East. I knew this because years before, when he was young and free to go any which way in the world pleased him, he moved across the country for me.

I was well aware that it was a big decision, and one that would prove to be a difficult adjustment in ways I was not able to imagine at the time. I suppose what I underestimated is just how long an adjustment might actually take

I want to try and write about it. I keep coming back to this thing, this internal struggle where I am trying to find my footing in a strange new place. At this point, I need to figure out why it feels strange after four years. Is it that the place is so odd? Lancaster is unique, to be sure. Even people from other parts of Pennsylvania or the neighboring states will tell you as much. I’m really afraid that it is something in me, that at a (relatively) young age, I’ve become set in certain ways, in certain ideas of the way the world should be- about what is beautiful and good.

As a college freshman studying “Humanities of (Insert Other Culture Here)”, I had a professor ask what we thought made a person identify so strongly with where he was from. We were reading Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (still one of my favorites), and the question was central to the theme of our text. Now I find it central to the theme of my life.

None of us really came up with a good answer then, on the spot. But I feel like I need to figure it out now, for myself. It might take me a while. It’s taken me about four years to even realize that I want to figure it out. I’ll appreciate any thoughts you might have along the way.