When I was 14, my parents had grown tired of living in Arizona. The once vibrant rocks became reminders that the town we lived in was a tourist town, and that meant volatile income. The summer months would bring in a flux of tourists seeking art, spirituality, and peace. They would flood the shops and the sidewalks and the rivers that flowed down out of the mountain north of us. But the winter months brought nothing but the cold. While were we lived was considered a desert landscape, it didn’t remain terribly warm during the winter, unlike the city of Phoenix that was way south of us. The art galleries would close their shops earlier and earlier in the day and the only cars on the roads were those of locals.
My parents also missed their friends. While my parents have never had the best of luck finding people who they called friends, they felt that the people in Sedona where not friend material. People flaked, they lied, they showed their true colors to my parents, and my parents were fed up with it. So where did they choose to move back to? Why, Missouri, of course (can you hear the bitterness in my voice?) Again, we sold our belongings and packed the rest into a U-Haul. For me, it was heartbreaking to say goodbye to kids who were intellectual and cultured, knowing that Missouri would have a very different type of kid. On our journey back, I watched the land I had come to love fade away into flat grass fields and corn stocks.
When we drew near to the suburbs of St. Louis, my parents called the landlord of a house that we wanted. We had informed him before we had left Arizona that we were on our way. When we were in Oklahoma, we told him we were nearly there. When we were on our way to the house, he told us he had sold the place. I remember parents looking at each other like, “What the fuck are we supposed to do now?” They had four kids and a few cats expecting to have a house to stay in that night but it didn’t happen. While we stayed in yet another hotel that night, my parents scrambled to find something. Eventually, they landed on a house in the small town of Wentzville.
Everything went through and we were able to move in. The place was nice enough but there was a pit forming in my stomach. To cut the very long story short (which will end up in another blog), I hated Wentzville and everyone in it. In seeing this, my parents decided to move us again to a town called Webster Groves, which was about 30-40 minutes away from Wentzville. It was far enough. We stayed there for 3 and half years. I made friends, I met my boyfriend there, and I eventually graduated from there.
Then, like clockwork, my parents wanted us to move. Their friendships had fallen to pieces and they were looking to run away from it all. This time it was to Maine. We had never been to Maine and we didn’t know anyone in Maine. Like so many times in the past, we packed up our stuff (I had learned to leave most of my stuff in boxes anyways) in the dead of winter, threw it in U-Haul with now one cat and a dog. I left my friends behind again along with my boyfriend. It took us three days to get there, and the journey had no shortages of blizzards and sleet. As we stumbled into our new home, cold and soggy from the ride, we quickly realized that we would not be able to stay in this house. With the vaulted ceilings and open floor plan, the heat in the house was fleeting and expensive.
And that’s where my family’s journey and mine split. I left for college that summer and moved down to Boston. My family ended up moving into a small house that was falling apart and had unfinished, well, everything. The staircase was crooked, the floorboards had nails sticking out of them, the cabinets were coming off the walls. And the heat was still high. In Maine, and I assume a lot of other New England states, use oil for heating. And most of the time oil is significantly more expensive than natural gas. It got so bad that my mom would have to tell my brothers not to take a bath because they wouldn’t be able to heat the rest of the house.
During my senior year of college, my mom called me to tell me that they were moving again. This time it was to Delaware. My mom had lived there once a long time ago and had a cousin there. They got rid of most everything, except for one cat, Honey (she’s a cat who’s been through it all with us and now lives with me).
This is my cat, Honey.
As of today, my mom, my step-dad, and my three brothers all live there. But they’ve started feeling the itch, the need to move again. I am also feeling the need to move. While I love Boston, I want to be somewhere completely new. I have no qualms about being alone in a new city.
So, if I were to say what the cons were of moving, I’d say that it’s hard to maintain friendships, it’s difficult getting situated again, and it is a challenge navigating a new grocery store to find where the damn mac ‘n cheese is. But moving around so much has also allowed me to adapt to new things easily and not be afraid of being on my own. Plus, it has lead me on some great adventures.
Pendulum Swings 