Post-move adjustment

Moving is hard.

The first time I moved, I was six years old. My family relocated from Pittsburgh--the only place I'd ever known, and the only place my parents had ever lived--to the suburbs of Baltimore. I was too young to really have any opinion on the matter.

About two years later, my family decided to move back home. I remember shedding a few tears over leaving my Maryland best friend, a cute, freckle-faced little girl named Leanne. Once I was back in Pittsburgh, though, I adjusted just fine. We didn't move again until about four years later, when my father accepted a promotion that took us to the suburbs of Cleveland, Ohio. I didn't want to go. We moved in the middle of my sixth grade term, and I was transferring from a large, urban middle school that allowed me freedom to move about between classes to a tiny, suburban elementary school that required me to ask permission to use the restroom at lunch time. It was a prism of three thousand different types of culture shock, and it took me a few years to fully acclimate to my new environment.

But I stayed there, in Northeast Ohio, until I was 25 years old. For two years, until just before my 27th birthday, I lived and attended graduate school in Pittsburgh. The city was familiar, and I still had plenty of friends and family there, so the move was easy-peasy. Upon completing my studies, I followed my boyfriend at the time to a small university city in Oklahoma. At the time, we believed it was temporary while he worked a contract teaching assignment. That made the laundry list of changes I confronted a bit easier, but I was never happy there. The environment--social, political, cultural, geographical, topographical--just wasn't for me, and my relationship was deteriorating. I attributed my difficulty adjusting to those factors, and after nearly two years in Tornado Alley, our relationship ended and I moved back to Cleveland.

I was there for a year. One year. I knew from the beginning that I would be returning to graduate school, and it just so happened that a university in Pittsburgh offered me a scholarship. I met my future husband, M, while I was back in Cleveland, and in an echo of my own history, he followed me out of town. We stayed in Pittsburgh for the extent of my graduate program, and then promptly returned to Cleveland.

Now here we are in Oregon.

From the moment M and I began discussing our future in terms of "us," staying in Cleveland indefinitely was not an option. M had never lived outside the region and wanted to see new horizons before he grew old. While I had spent the majority of my life in Northeast Ohio--enough time to consider myself a Clevelander, despite being born elsewhere--I had a thirst to roam roads west of the Mississippi. Until you have a concrete plan to move, every discussion about it is in the abstract: A comment on vacation about buying this or that home, for instance, or a quick glimpse of a thriving business somewhere advertising their need for help. These are what-if moments, the moments where you joke with your spouse that you could simply pull off the highway right this moment and place a stake in the ground, and that would be the start of a new life. You don't really do that, though, because that would be absurd and unadult and irresponsible.

What you do is wait for a good time or a stroke of serendipity. At least that's what we did. M's job is more portable than mine; mine requires strategy to transport across state lines. I set up a job alert for the west coast in a moment of wanderlust, and I figured, "When the alert dings wildly, that will be the universe's way of shoving us out the door." That's exactly what happened.

It was natural, then, to think that Lady Luck or Cousin Coincidence or Darling Destiny would carry us through our move as though we were weightless. I naively thought it would be easy. After all, I had moved plenty of times before, and never with a fantastic job offer in hand. All we needed to do was find a place to live, move in our belongings, and start going about our lives in a new area. Ideally, it would be a new area that pushed on a part of our heart long-ago numbed to Cleveland. Ideally, it would be a place that made us wonder-eyed.

Unfortunately, it just isn't that easy. Wonder-eyed and heart-poked as I am, I find it lonely here. I miss seeing people I know at the grocery store. I miss chatting in the early evening with our neighbors as they drunkenly shuffle home from the bar. I miss the ease with which I used to stroll through my old office, knowing everyone, knowing where everything was, feeling competent and capable in my work. I miss the ease with which I could name the stores that carried this or that hard-to-find product at the best price, or find a spot to go see live music on a Saturday night, or navigate around a traffic jam in record time. I miss the organized chaos of our old house, too small for us but familiar enough to walk through blindfolded. I miss knowing the origin of each sound in the night, and the blare of the five a.m. train two blocks north, and the smell of the rose bushes in our front flower bed. I planted those myself, along with three holly plants, two bunches of perennial flowers, and one shade-loving hosta. I chose all of them after a trip to the store with my landscape handy mother, who pointed out to me which plants would do best in each tiny square of our bed.

I miss those things now, on a Saturday night in Medford, when M and I have nothing to do. We have no one to do it with. I wouldn't say that I am unhappy; every morning, on my drive north, I see mountains and rolling hills and trees so tall they can't possibly be real, and I fall into a state of wonder at the beauty of creation.

Lower Table Rock, taken by me from the top of Upper Table Rock

I am granted simple but meaningful courtesies from strangers, store clerks, coworkers, and new neighbors, and in my hypersensitive state, I am pushed to the brink of tears with gratitude. So no, I wouldn't say that I am unhappy, and if I am being rational, I think we could stay here for a long time. If I am being rational, I recognize that right now is a time of transition, and change is hard. I am uncomfortable and, if I am honest, I am grieving. As much as I always knew we'd leave home, there are things about it that I miss, and I am grieving those things. I think that is natural.

We have been in Medford exactly one month today. I have vacillated between moments of longing for home and moments of near-euphoric joy at being able to explore a new, beautiful slice of the world. I have made decisions about taking a community writing course and starting new hobbies, including this blog. I make mental notes of other activities I want to try, like making mosaics or jewelry, and those I want to do more of, like exploring more parks and hiking trails here.  I remember that every time I moved before, I made friends eventually. Sure, I was younger, but I was still me. That Me, who was less certain of who she was by nature of knowing herself for fewer years, was able to make plenty of friends. Certainly this older, wiser, more self-confident Me will, too. It just takes time.