Uprooted

We've been settled in our new place for two years now, but I'm still feeling very much like a transplant. I have come a long way towards feeling more at home -- at first I was even prejudiced against the local flora; it seemed so much coarser than the refined New England landscape I was used to (I came from being surrounded by rock maple and shagbark hickory and white pine, and here I still haven't learned what trees I'm looking at -- it's amazing what a difference that makes, the landscape here still feels foreign to me).

It's odd, but when I'm in familiar territory I feel like I carry less with me. I have memories, experience & knowledge embodied in the places around me that I can pick up and use in context. When I'm out of my element and don't have that to rely on, I feel off balance. I have to pack up all those memories and carry them with me and I wind up feeling much smaller, distinctly separate from my surroundings.

I lived in one area essentially my entire life, so there was a lot to miss when we first moved. The park I'd gone to for 30 years -- I'd played there as a kid and my own kids played there (I even walked around the pond there in labor with my second). My favorite run -- a loop through woods and fields. The road to my grandmother's house that I'd walked, biked and driven.

I can't just pick up and move and live anywhere -- I need to send out roots and feelers and dig in, really inhabit a place to feel at home. Lots of walking has helped me get a better sense of place here. With every footfall my roots have a chance to spread. My new favorite place to run is an echo of my favorite run from home -- it's a loop through woods and fields at Black Creek park. There's a short stretch through white pines (which are few and far between here) where I'll usually hear a wood thrush singing, just as I did on my runs at home.

I have serviceable substitutes form my old favorite bookstores, coffee shops and grocery stores, but nothing to replace one of my old landmarks -- Brigg's Shady Oaks Farm. I used to live in a town where the milkman would still deliver to your house -- but I preferred picking up milk at the farm instead, because you could take the kids in the barn and visit the cows and new calves. Bobby Briggs also sold animal feed and bedding, butter, eggs, cheese and bacon, and had an ice cream stand in the summer. Occasionally you'd have to stop on your way to work as the cows crossed the road from the barn to the fields. The place was right around the corner from my house -- when C. was tiny I'd walk up with her in the stroller and tuck the milk under her seat for the walk home. When my grandmother's family first moved down from Maine in the '40s, my great-grandfather worked at Briggs. The house they settled into was a bit farther from the farm than the house I grew up in -- he didn't walk to the farm to work, but rode his horse.

You know, I was ostensibly going to write about how I almost never feel homesick anymore, but this is really making it worse. Not as bad as last October, though when the Red Sox won the world series -- torture watching that from Yankees territory!