Hometown familiarity gives me mixed emotions. I like getting to know a place, and I usually do feel like I've adopted a new town within a year or two of living there. But with that comes the fear that it's almost time to move again, as soon as I've grown to know and love a town as if I had lived there most of my life. It has happened to me more times than I care to remember, living in a town for only two or three years before my family and I are whisked away to a whole new part of the country. One has to learn to adapt quickly, and we always did. I often wonder what it would have been like to live in one town for most of my life. Do a lot of people still do that? It's so far out of my experience that I just don't know how to relate to it. Me, I relate more to the sadness of leaving a town behind, and the excitement of having a whole new geographic puzzle to solve.
I've been in this house for three and a half years now. This is the point where I ought to be making plans to pack my house, sorting out things to donate, and studying real estate listings all night before bedtime. Instead, I am facing the obligation to go through all those boxes I packed up over twenty years, that I swore I'd sort once I was in my forever house. It's a daunting task, and it takes a lot of faith that I'm really settled. I had to reach the point where I believed all the moving was over. I think I'm ready. I just need a little help with the sorting.
I knew today that I'd reached that pinnacle of familiarity with my current hometown. It hit me as a good feeling, with an underpinning of melancholy for all the places I left prematurely. I've been here long enough that I recognize strangers' Christmas light arrangements from years past. There's a dark green house on the back route to Lowe's that always uses a cold blue/white icicle light all the way around their corner property. The Cheese Importers always rims their windows with all green lights, although this year they apparently declined to add the laser-projected lattice of green over the facade of the building. The square downtown where the city tree is (where the regular Saturday protests take place) always uses an animated white raindrop set of lights. Okay, maybe they should be considered "falling snowflakes," but they don't look like it to me. Some of my neighbors put up a big display of inflatables every year, along with a lighted star with rays/strands of lights coming out of it. In old town, there are neighbors in hundred year old houses who try to out-do each other every time, crowding their porches and yards with every light, every vintage plastic sculpture, every everything they can find. (I really like those two.) And then there's my favorite--the original farmhouse that existed before my neighborhood was built up in the 1950s and 60s. It's on a large lot, possibly a full acre. It has an orchard in the way back, a big barn-like detached garage, an expansive chicken coop and fenced "pasture," and a large brick house. Every year they line all the eaves and ridges with warm C-9 lights, covering the whole house, the barn, and even the chicken coop. They have a lamppost with colored lights too. I don't know what it is about that place. Its age, its permanence, its familiarity... something is just so comforting to me. I hope it never changes.
No comments:
Post a Comment