Where We Ought to Be

Inspirational song: We Belong (Pat Benatar)

I'm still waiting for that phone call that says the kid arrived at her new apartment. When last we spoke, she was zooming up on the town where she went to high school, still a few hours away from her destination. She pondered stopping at a gas station in the desert that was a couple blocks from her school, but decided she wasn't returning to relive high school, and besides, she didn't need to see the campus she always thought looked like a minimum-security prison. I agreed at the time we lived there, that it definitely lacked architectural charm. From the first time we took her out there to live, when she was about eleven years old, she has had a bond with the state that I never could manage for myself. In sixth grade, she swore to me that this was where she belonged, and when we moved to Oklahoma soon after, to the town where she was born, she told me it just didn't speak to her like California did. I thought the harshness of our next trip west, in the brutal high desert, would have cured her of the love of the state, but I underestimated how deeply it ran in her blood. I never want to live down there again, but it's where my girl says she wants to be. I have to respect that. And I guess I need to think of things I want to do when we go visit. There are always the Central Coast wineries. They were nice.

Up until the last few months, I thought that I could convince the man that we had a good thing going with our Park, and there was no reason to leave it if we had an opportunity to stay. I really feel like I fit in here, like I speak the language. And other than those really miserable six weeks or so from late July to Labor Day, I enjoy the humidity and the sun. But the man simply hasn't gotten to live here like I have. I know he worked here, but he really didn't get to live. I wanted him to take some time and discover how wonderful this place is when he gets back from his work abroad. I don't have a lot of faith that I will succeed. His job has been difficult, with long hours and changing conditions. He's been separated from his family and his reality by more than just miles. The poor man is flat out used up right now. He needs a vacation. He needs several vacations. He needs a little time to remember how to be a kid again. Right now, he's developing a misanthropic streak that just doesn't fit his true self. He wants to pack us up and run off into the deep mountains, far away from neighbors and farther away from anything that resembles a city. And while I am perfectly happy to give him some time to reconnect with the mountains where he belongs (belongs in the same sense his daughter was meant to be a Cali girl), I am not about to set up a permanent house in the remote woods, where we live for the rest of our lives with only each other for company. That's just asking for trouble. I need to be closer to town than that.

In our frequent conversations that consist of emails of nothing but Zillow links, we both kind of stumbled on one that I keep going back to. I think the reason he noticed it was he thought it was funny that the Google satellite image plainly shows that someone mowed a giant peace sign in the farmland up for sale. For me, it seems like the perfect building site. It is a little flatter than I expected to find there, but it is exactly in the location I wanted. It's rural, but it is no more than a ten minute drive in any direction to the outskirts of several perfectly lovely communities. I "drove" around it on Google a couple times over the last week, and today I found that the street view goes farther into it than I had realized. I got a chance to see some of the neighboring places, and I found older farmhouses that were very down to earth and unpretentious. I said out loud, to my computer, "These are our people. We belong there." Now I'm absolutely smitten by this location. I need to take a trip out soon, and see what the place feels like in person. I've been fooled by internet listings before. Boy, have I been fooled. I will never buy a home or a piece of land sight unseen, but I have a good feeling about this one. I really do.