Coming Home

Our house at the end of the rainbow

The Eagle has landed!  We bought a house on a quarter acre just north of Seattle.  My husband has the hot tub and chickens he’s wanted for years.  I have clean air and gardens, and peace. It’s just the right combo of city, suburb, and country. I love it.

I forgot how stressful moving is.  Then we moved three times in eight months–into a short-term spot in a new state, then a rental house, then our own permanent house–and I remembered. Holy cow!  It’s stressful!  Find a place, move, unpack enough to live; find a place, move, unpack enough to live; find a place, move, unpack…..everything?  Get a mortgage, find a job, get lost forty million times even with GPS.  I’m still finding stuff I needed last winter–sweaters (it was cold), flat iron (crazy hair all winter), Kitchenaid whisk– that we accidentally put in a storage unit.

My health was so much a Rosanna-Rosanna-Dana sketch that at times I thought hope had gotten buried in the storage unit, too.  You know, “If it’s not one thing, it’s another.”  But it finally stopped raining and the sun came out.  And, like peeling an onion, the docs and I uncovered and mended one problem after another.  For the record and a public therapeutic moment, I’ve weathered:

• broken shoulder in a fall
• three frayed and one torn shoulder tendon
• kidney and bladder infection
• poor vision caused by severe dry eye,
• broken cheekbone in a fall
• bruised ribs from two falls,
• severe anemia
• infected root canal
• sciatica
• inflamed SI joint.

Plus the usual suspects of heart failure, adrenal insufficiency, and reactive lungs. On top of the afore mentioned moves.  OMG!  No wonder I was tired and dropped off the face of the Earth.  Maybe if I read this blog enough times, I’ll stop giving myself a hard time for not having had enough energy to be  engaged with the world, vivacious, and active in the ways I wish I’d been.

But I made it!   I’m home.  I read outdoors in the shade again, open my windows to fresh air and the sound of birds again, walk with my dogs again, and ride my bike on sun dappled paths along rivers.  I’ve planted flowers, weeded gardens, harvested peas, lettuce, radishes, and raspberries.  We’re exploring mountains and forests at least once a week.  I see well enough again to drive after dark.    I take deep breaths and feel my body relax.  I’m beginning to live again.