To Move Or Not To Move

Moving to a new location is challenging at our age. I know. I just moved from Santa Fe, New Mexico, to Sonoma, a medium sized town in Northern California. Even though I used to live on the other side of this county, and spent 36 years of my life in the San Francisco Bay Area, it's been quite an upheaval.

Of course it has not been as challenging as when I moved to New Mexico in the first place! The two places are dramatically different. I had never lived in the desert, and I missed water so much I literally cried when I stepped up on a viewing platform on Sandia Mountain and saw a little watering hole that I couldn't approach!

California is a big, busy, bustling state with the country's largest population, and New Mexico is a big state with very few people. I had been living in the country; now I was in the middle of New Mexico's biggest city, Albuquerque, an appallingly flat town with six-lane avenues criss-crossing its sprawling breadth, and an unvarying bright blue sky that produced very few cloud formations, certainly none of those thick coastal fog banks, or buckets of rain all winter long. What passed for cuisine was almost always meat with chili and a pile of unsalted pinto beans, and there was no such thing as medical marijuana. California, the vanguard of America, is on the cusp of the future, while New Mexico cherished its history and seemed to cling to its lingering past, even though it's riddled with colonialism, racism and poverty.

But the biggest challenge was my state of mind: I was at my wit's end. My children were both embarking on lives of their own. Real estate values were about to plummet and I was afraid my house would end up under water. I had lost my job as editor of a small paper and there were no new jobs around. My life had hit a wall and it felt like I was about to die if I didn't do something else.

So, I went to New Mexico, with a very unclear picture of what I was going to do there. During the first months I longed for everything about my old home: my kids, my house, my dog who had passed away, the cats I had left behind, the friends I had known for forty years.

It was strange that nobody knew me, not even a clerk at the grocery store. I didn't like the feeling of being unknown and uprooted, and many mornings I cried.

When I moved to Santa Fe, things picked up a bit, but then my health fell apart. I stayed in the City Different for six years, much longer than I had anticipated, always thinking I needed to go back where I came from and somehow being stopped. Suddenly last April, everything came together, and in May I had an apartment all approved. I had only to -- shudder, shudder -- dismantle my life and leave. Yikes! What had sounded great was suddenly overwhelming. I would have welcomed any excuse to stay put, but the gods seemed to beckon me west. It would have been ungrateful to refuse.

This move was a return, not to the same house or even the same town, but back. I had roots in this land -- I remember when I grew them, but that's a story for another time -- and the land of golden hills had not let go of its hold on my heart, no matter how much Santa Fe had become a cloak that well suited me.

It was hard. Some people called me "courageous." It was nice to hear, but on some deep level this wasn't about courage. It was something I had to do. Leaving after so many years was hard but it was definitely good for me. I'll tell you more about it in my next post, which by the way you can also view at my new blog, Moving Right Along, at wordpress.com/ as soon as I set it up.

Wherever you are, have a great day!