Roots

I've been thinking a lot lately about roots, and where I come from. A little over a year ago, I was given the opportunity to move "back home" and rent a house from an old high school friend. The events leading up to the offer were tough (incredibly long story short - my four feline leukemia positive cats were taken from me and put to sleep, in a crazy whirlwind day), but once the offer was made, and I felt like my life in Maryland was in shambles, I knew it was happening for a reason.

Looking back at Facebook memories, things that felt like they took a lifetime actually happened so quickly. My transfer with work was a huge pain, but it happened fairly quickly; selling basically everything I owned happened quickly; borrowing a van and packing up what was left of my belongings and getting them into a storage locker in northeastern Pennsylvania actually happened very quickly. I think back about it and feel like it must have taken me months to get everything to fall into place, when in reality, the whole process took about two weeks. From the moment the cats were taken away, until the moment I pulled up in my dad's driveway with my dogs and a tote of clothes was only about a two week process, and that only further cements the fact to me that it was meant-to-be.

The offer in Pennsylvania was too good to be true. In Maryland, I had been renting a small double-wide on an acre of land, and was paying $900/month just for rent. That didn't include heating oil in the winter, or electric to run the air conditioning in the summer, or cable/internet. I was offered a considerably larger house, complete with a wrap-around porch and a large unfinished basement on a comparable sized piece of land for $750/month, including electricity and internet. It really was a no-brainer.

Starting over is always hard. My job has become a sort of comfort zone, so even starting over at a new location is never bad - learning new names and new habits of people is challenging, but I have done it repeatedly, and it's become old-hat. There's always this sense of "now what?" though.

Despite moving back to the area where I grew up, everything is different. Some old friends moved away, and some stayed. Others have come back over the years, either to this same area or at least to the general region where we grew up. But nothing is the same. I used to come home and visit a few times a year, and never saw any old friends. For a long time, I didn't drive, so I had no way to go visit people out here in the country, and by the time I did start driving - I felt like they wouldn't want to see me anyway (I blame the depression and constant anxious thoughts much more than the reality of the situation). Over the years when I would come home to visit, even my family would go on with their lives as if I wasn't here, so moving back I knew I would be alone and have to re-figure-out who I was, and how I fit into a world that I hadn't been a part of for fourteen years.

It's crazy how all of it works, really. It's crazy who comes around and who doesn't. In my first week, I connected with a girl I went to high school with, and we went out to trivia night at a bar (admittedly, this was so I could meet a guy I had been talking to on a dating site - which did not end well). This was a girl I hadn't even talked to in high school. I knew her name, and I'm sure I had seen her face, but this wasn't someone I really knew. And yet, there was something comforting about reconnecting with my past. I got together a few months later for dinner with a girl friend who still lived locally, and another who was home to visit. It was comforting how it was like we never skipped a beat. It was as if I hadn't been gone for fourteen years.

My meetings with old friends have been few and far between. I have managed to make friends at work who keep me fairly sane in an insane world. But now, I am invited to things locally. Old friends have made an effort to let me know about their baby showers, parties, church events. While I haven't been able to attend many things, they're always such a comfort. It's amazing how much I still have in common with the people that I have known since we were kids. I always assumed that the only thing we had in common was that we grew up on this mountain, but that nothing else could connect us. And yet, here I am, reconnected with friends and acquaintances that I knew back then, and everything just seems okay with the world. It's oddly comforting to be surrounded by people who knew who I was before. Before I ever had a broken heart, before I went away and roamed for years. They knew who I was before I lost my mother, and perhaps that's a part of it - even though I don't really talk about it. These people knew who I was before loss, before the world chewed me up and spit me back out, before I felt myself lying crumpled up and useless on the floor. They knew me before depression reared its ugly head, and before the episodes where I was too broken to leave the house. They knew me before I had the guts to stand up for myself, and before I had any sense of self-value. They knew, and they were still right there beside me.

Roots are a funny thing, I guess. No matter how hard you try to believe that you don't have any, there they are - pulling you back in, helping to keep you from completely falling flat on your face. I swore for years that there was nothing to hold me here, and that I had no roots. And yet, here I am, embracing everything that made me who I was.

And really, I think I kind of like it.