Every Day

My mom started a nature writer's club. If I wasn't far away, I would go to it. Thanks to the Internet...I can still enjoy it even though I'm not a part of it. I visit their blog. I read the books on their reading list.

The first book was Always, Rachel, a collection of letters exchanged between Rachel Carson and her close friend Dorothy Freeman. (I think that's her last name. I'll check on it later.) It's a fat volume, and some of it is tedious. It's not a good starter read if you are not already familiar with Ms. Carson. I think you'd have to be head over heels in love with her to find all these pages interesting. I like her, alright, but I don't really know her well enough yet to be in love with her...so I skim through the pages.

There are descriptions of their tidepooling adventures together, but also of the days they couldn't go because someone had a cold or the plumber was late. Of course, later on in the book, Rachel can't do much of anything because she's battling against cancer. It's sweet to read how Dorothy sent something to Rachel every day in the mail while she had cancer. It's also sad and strange, and tragically poetic that this woman who worked so hard to make the world safer for all of us, who dared to speak out about the dangers of our chemical lifestyle, would suffer so? I don't know the timing of her life exactly. Did she publish Silent Spring before she started to get sick? Was she researching how pesticides are crawling through the food chain while her own body was turning against her...or did the tumors come later? I don't know.

I don't even know about my own timing, my own body. When did my tumors start to grow? What gave me breast cancer? Was it living near the power plants? (There is one on each side of Los Osos.) Was it poison in the bay? (My own house was one of the polluters.) Was it a karmic kickback from my job as a drug pusher? (How long can you dole out medicine before you have to take some yourself?) I'll never know.

It really doesn't matter. Whats the point of knowing how I got cancer, unless it's going to help me avoid getting it again? Maybe Diablo Canyon and Morro Bay and Boehringer-Ingelheim caused my cancer, but I love the Central Coast and I plan to live there again.

Even if it means I'll live a shorter life, loose my other breast, chance chemo and radiation...I am moving back. Even if it means I have to work again as a pharmaceutical sales rep, I'll go.

I decided that last week, after being on the ground in San Luis Obispo County for less than 10 minutes. In the airport parking lot, surrounded by mostly cement, I remembered like a flood. "This is home. This is home."

I called K the next morning and told her so. I told her, "this is where we belong." And she said, "I think so too."

But we can't move just yet. There are lovely people living in my house, and they're not ready to go. There are a million things we need to do in our own lives to get ready, not the least of which is...find jobs in San Luis. So I'm back in Colorado for now. Wiping my runny nose on my layered sleeves and crouching by the roaring wood stove. Watching the white snow blanket the brown slopes. Relearning that one warm week in March does not mean winter's over in April.

Since I officially moved her on the first of the year, I've been happy with K, and happy to reconnect with friends. I've been happy to go running with Piper, and happy to eat at my favorite local restaurants.

But, I have not been happy to be living here, looking toward a long life here. I feel trapped between these brown mountains and these browner plains. I guess I used to be happy enough to live here...back in my twenties, before I'd walked those green hills, before I'd touched a surfboard or owned a sailboat. But happy enough doesn't feel like enough anymore.

How silly I've been since January, trying to settle in here, when I know my home is elsewhere.

My thought process had been: 1. K owns a house here in Boulder, and I don't own a house anywhere. 2. K has a job here in Boulder and I don't have a job anywhere. 3. K has a loving community of friends here in Boulder, and because I lived here from 1994 to 2002, so do I.

But I forgot it takes more than a house to make a home. I forgot that jobs are changeable and that community is larger than the town in which you live. I forgot that I don't have choose between the two biggest happinesses in my life. Karen and California needn't be mutually exclusive.

Having realized all this, and made that decision, I find myself newly delighted with Boulder. It's a lovely town and I have history here. I charmed anew by the bike path along the creek, and freshly awed by the mountain peaks.

I ran into an old friend at the post office yesterday. I would not have her phone number in my bicycle bag now if I hadn't come to live here. I wouldn't have eaten a pop-over at Breadworks on Saturday morning. I wouldn't have seen the snow on the Flatirons Sunday afternoon. A thousand small pleasures and insights are mine because I am here. I'm able to enjoy and notice them now that I've removed the life sentence from myself and my little family. I can be here now, because we don't have to stay.

It's like we are on sabbatical. What a nice opportunity...to stay for a while in Boulder.

And how convenient the timing is! We just happen to be here in the same window of time that my good friend C. has landed here. She's in Denver for a few years, working on her advanced degree. It's no small thing, a chance to stay close to a friend like C. She's as good a friend to me as Ms.Freeman was to Rachel Carson. When I had cancer C., like Dorothy, sent something in the mail. Every day.