Oh, The Places You’ll Go

I had a surge of well-being overtake me on Friday. That was God. He does that, you know.

My oldest daughter’s family moved into a new home this weekend, and my husband and I went to Dallas to help out. Going from a small house to a large one makes for easy unpacking, but nothing is easy when you have a baby. My family moved 13 times while we raised our kids. I made that number up, but it’s not a far from the truth. Seems we were always living out of boxes. Not until we moved into the house we are in now did I even unpack all the boxes that I sealed in 2005. The time capsules travelled with us. A clock inside them had stopped like a timeline with a dead end. The last 20 years have been an offshoot of the life we left behind in Austin, and we’ve left crumbs all over San Antonio and Houston and even Dallas a little since the departure. Austin isn’t where we started, but it’s where our kids did, sort of. So Austin kinda feels like home. But not really. Dallas is where I’m from and is the place I always carry with me. Now my daughter is there, so a part of me has returned home. She’s a Dallas-ite by default, and it suits her. My brother deserted Dallas for Fort Worth eons ago, and that place suits him. A bit of Austin, that place is. Stuck between two worlds, that place is, like my brother. My kids aren’t really from anywhere because they are from everywhere, but DNA has a sneaky way of pointing us to our roots.

I’ll never live in Dallas. You can never go home again, a guy said once. The house I grew up in belongs to strangers now.

We’ve been in this house for nearly seven years. I unpacked all my boxes not that long ago, finally, to find a treasure of little girl things and forgotten memories. But I still haven’t put up pictures. I haven’t reached a sense of permanence just yet.

It feels good to be back in my own bed tonight with my own pillows and my cat at the foot of my bed stalking my feet. The cat that travelled with us since Austin is a few feet underground outside my window, so I guess this home is more permanent than I’ve really thought it to be. A part of us will remain in the soil when we leave. And we will leave. It’s weird to think we won’t. A yurt wouldn’t be out of the question for us. But this isn’t Mongolia.