There's No Place like Home

When I worked in California, before moving to New Mexico full time, we taught the students the basic needs of all species to ensure their survival as an individual, and a species:

FWARPS. Food, water, air, reproduction, protection, space.
It was fun working through the acronym from their 12 year old brains. Of course they never guessed Reproduction, and would giggle when I said it. They would guess the "S" stood for shelter, which I would lump under protection. But the final word, "space" really got them. I liked to teach this in the San Bernardino NF, next to a thick stand of hundreds of Ponderosa or Jeffery pine that were only about 6 inches in diameter with a foot on average between them. Next, I would take them to the strand and tell them about the unicorn sightings and explain that if they hug a tree and make a wish, it would come true, and that if they saw a unicorn they couldn't ever tell anyone... but this post is about space, not unicorns.

Over the years, I've identified my growing need for "space". In a recent appointment with my therapist, I was illustrating my own basic needs, and amongst "friends" and "nature" was space: both internal and external, illustrated by me in a little treehouse, with nature all around.

On a recent trip with a group of senior citizens, an older man named George asked where I was from. "I grew up in Texas, but now I live in Albuquerque", is one stock response that glosses over my transient period. "Oh, how long you been there?" he asked. "4.5 years," I bragged, "but the previous 5 years I had lived in 16 different places." "Oh wow. Where to next...?" he inquired. I smiled.
Although he and most of the crowd had been living in Albuquerque since the 80's, all transplanted from the East Coast or some far away place with an entirely different climate, he somehow recognized that my time in this city was coming to an end. 

The view from my old porch

When I ended my season of teaching in California, I moved to the space from which I am typing this. A small one-bedroom casita with modern fridgedaire appliances in a 27-acre park with apple trees, grapevines and lots of space. Friends and family have teased that I found my retirement job a little early. This space has been my Home, and I mean that in the deepest comforts of the word. On stressful days, I've walked from my front door to the pecan orchard and watched the ducks bathing in the irrigated grove. I've seen baby geese and blooming roses along the trails. I've had to say things like "please don't move your furniture into the sunflowers," and "Sorry sir, you can't use your metal detector here" and been offered a guinea hen, and told that I'm the Poop Fairy. In addition to being a constantly amusing albeit public place to live, this home has also been my safe place through the ups and downs of getting a great job, and losing one, and boyfriends coming in and out of my life, and this world. 

Kitchen/living room

 These walls have seen several shades of love, as I've shared them with my first fiancee, my game-warden-bound best friend and her adorable dog Boone, a work friend and her dog and occasionally her boyfriend, my soul-mate who met an untimely fate, and a couple of years with this wild man I'm looking forward to spending my life with. Under this roof, I grew and practiced different kinds of love. 
These walls have shared the laughter of long nights of rants and giggles. The floors show stains of memories from Amil squeezing peaches to distill into peach liquor, and the walls show a few knuckle dents from when things were really hard to take.

There are desert and NM skies like these elsewhere.

Despite all my fond memories of this fishbowl, I may have worn out my welcome. Two friends recently told me, in their own words, that... In life, when you feel like you it's time to do something different, you should really listen to that. I had held onto this space, despite my exhaustion of opening and closing the gates every day, sleeping with my phone on in case I don't hear the alarm, having to find someone to live-in my house and do my jobs for every night I didn't stay there, and the utter lack of privacy of living in the middle of a parking lot. I held on to the perks of my slice of nature in the city, and the pride of the reputation I have built in my Home. But I finally realized this summer, that there are other Homes. We found a beautiful place to rent in Valdez, NM, along a stream in a verdant canyon under the highest mountain in the state. The neighbors are like minded, the dog can roam free, and there is easy access to the Carson NF. 

Farewell, sweet little abode. 

On the day that I moved all my stuff up, I saw a bus boy watering the plants outside with the leftover water glasses from the table; we donated $10 to the local fire department and were told in exchange "thanks! We'll save you first" in all sincerity; and we discovered that the local "post office" is just a stand of P.O. Boxes. I think this place is going to be a good fit for a while. I can definitely start to feel like this is Home. 
[Check out the song Lost Boy on the link, can you hear me on the back-up vocals? 

---- Just for fun: -------

The 3 stages of packing up your shit.
1) I am the definition of simplicity!
During this phase, you throw out everything you touch, thinking about how good you're going to feel packing the three little boxes into your car when it's time to move. You start with biggest stuff you've been threatening to get rid of, then work your way to the junk drawers and nooks of nothing you've been holding on to since college. You create piles of questionable materials like anything electronic and dead pens...wondering where you can recycle such things.
2) I might need this, later...
About halfway through the purge, you start thinking about your life in the next situation. What if it doesn't exactly work out. What if every Salvation Army and Goodwill across the country suddenly close and you can't ever get that rug/hat/jewelry stand/ boot scraper back...
3) To sleep, or to pack, that is the question: 
Finally, you realize that it will take as many years to sort through everything as it did to accumulate it. You put everything left in boxes, take the final three loads to goodwill, and just move it to the next place, getting rid of more stuff there as it doesn't quite fit with your new floor plan. 

The Move

The most valuable thing that has been reinforced in my two months of living back home is that I am a sponge. It may be apparent to readers from our cross country journey, but it didn’t sink in until the last week or so of living with the folks. I guess another way of saying it is that I am adaptive. Perhaps one of the reasons I get along so well in jobs is because I don’t take on a direct personality of my own, but reinstate the values and beliefs of my superiors and peers. It’s not that I don’t have my own values and beliefs, although admittedly they are still forming, it’s just part of my natural character to slide into the attitudes of the people I’m around. This was evident at home, where I put aside my preferences for peeing outside, reading and writing for entertainment, and vegan eating and instead lay on the couch and watch a long movie, nibbled on cheesy delicacies, and utilized modern luxuries that I have been without in my cross country travels.
The point of this realization is that now that I am finally here in my own space with my fiancé, I get to build a space that completely caters to my values, adding in and keeping out the things I observed from staying with friends across the country. Today is the day that I set routines that will hopefully propel me into life patterns, and I feel a mix between pressure and excitement. It’s like a new year in many ways- not only is the weather warming from a mercurial winter, but a new job is starting and my  26^th birthday is around the corner. This is an exciting time for my blog, too, because instead of just plopping right into my sustainably-focused mind, I can chart out each decision on a new slate. In fact, to commemorate this, I am switching blogsites. I’m going to shift to Blogger, eventually backlogging all my old tumblr blogs. I think that blogspot is a little more professional looking, with a lot more options, such as people being able to comment*, and it will allow me several tabs to organize my blogs into personal rants like these, DIY projects, and art that I’ve accomplished.
So now that the world knows what’s up, I guess there’s nothing left to do but put down the computer and begin to build my new world, my way, with some help from my fiancé, of course.
—Flash forward 2 weeks:
Designing a creative, functional space where I can be productive and happy has not been as easy as I imagined. I’m writing this from my favorite corner that this morning I dubbed my “office,” which is nothing but a creaky but comfy  papasaun and the edge of a desk slightly out of arms distance, now stacked with books, notepads, jump drives, and notebooks. Although I am happy sitting in my ‘office’ where I spent most of yesterday knitting, I can’t help but feel a bit boring. I am slowly getting into the routine that will be my life in this space, which is to say that there is no routine at all. It reminds me of college- navigating appointments and gym hours between classes and meetings. I loved that schedule, thrived in it, even…and yet I feel so displaced from it here. I love living in Albuquerque, and I’ve been trying to take advantage of every little opportunity that presents itself to me- like I also did in college. But I don’t feel ‘at home’ yet. The walls are decorated with our favorite designs, the counters are full of our beloved things, and yet, I’m unsure how to interact with the space. Perhaps I’m not sure how to redefine home now that I have the opportunity to make a space away from my parents and the people and spaces I called home for most of my life, even if I have been removed from those spaces for several years. I guess home is where the heart is and although my stuff is here, and I like it here, I’m not in Love yet, and my heart remains in those humid summer nights, the crunch of the oak leaves under the drying crab grass, and the handful of days when the windows can be open and the inside and outside world are in harmony.  Will I ever find a home like that again? Will it take another 18 years of living in one place to have the roots of my heart remain so firmly in one place? I imagine Austin will always be home, even as the city that once revealed such possibility to me, is now foreign and threatening. But can I make this place feel like home in my heart, knowing that I won’t be living here for 18 years, or probably even 1/4^th of that.
I guess through the last 6 years of moving around, I have held home my heart, absorbing how others interact with me and the spaces I live in…and now that there are no more attitudes to pick up, no more ideals to imitate…I’m left with my empty artwork, and this big old space wondering where I start making the connections just between me and the land. And how?