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Searching for Home (Warning: long post about nothing)

That blog title may seem odd since I’ve been in this house since 1999.  Mt. Juliet has been home because this is (mostly) where my kids grew up.  Sure, they remember Barrow and Fairbanks and living the Alaskan life, but they were little guys when we moved here.  Matt was 3rd grade and Tyler was just getting ready for kindergarten.  As for me, prior to moving here I’d spent the bulk of my life in Alaska, some of it on Ft. Wainwright, some of it in North Pole, some of it in Barrow, and much of it in Fairbanks. 

During my childhood we bounced from post to post as a military family (no complaints, I loved it), and didn’t really settle until Dad retired and I was entering high school in North Pole.  We spent a period going back and forth between Ft. Wainwright , Alaska (4th,5th,6th grade, then 9-12th) and Ft. Bragg, North Carolina (K 1,2,3 then 7th and 8th grade). But when you return to a post you don’t return to the friends you once had, they’ve all moved on.  You go into different housing, different schools, and make new friends.  I was born in Georgia, but have no memory of the state. We lived in Louisiana and I have vague memories of it, none very good.  I was more, or maybe less, fortunate than some depending on how you look at it.  More fortunate because I sometimes returned to familiar areas, and as the youngest in my family I was the only one who was able to start and finish high school in one place.  Less fortunate because my dad had an aversion to putting in for posts overseas - so many of my friends had the opportunity to live in Germany, Italy, Spain, and other exciting spots.  When my family was military Alaska was considered comparable to overseas posts, so that’s where we went.  My sister was born just as Alaska became a state in 1959.  My brother was born there as well, and two years after his arrival I was born 4,284 miles away at Ft. Benning, Georgia.  Our family made many trips up and down the Al-Can Highway (through Canada to Alaska)  and it wasn’t paved.   Three kids crammed into a station wagon that’s pulling a U-Haul (or a camper) on a washboard gravel road for 2200 miles with very little to see...someone give my mother a medal.   No doubt that road and its amenities have improved, but at that time it was sparse. I spent seventeen years of my life in Alaska, I stayed well after the rest of my family had fled.  By the time I was eighteen I was without parents or siblings in the state but I had Mickey.  I was young and in love.  My parents had moved to Florida, my sister had followed love to Rochester,New York, and my brother had joined the Army and was in Germany.  Alaska is where I started married life, became a mother, and experienced so many of life’s firsts.  But I don’t miss it.  Fairbanks is kind of a gritty town.  Not the Fairbanks that tourists see, but the town that’s there after the snow flies.  Perhaps if my roots were in Sitka or Juneau or even somewhere in the Matanuska Valley I’d feel a longing to go back.  Maybe not. Everything is harder there.  As a mother of two little boys just the logistics of getting to the grocery store and back were a pain.  Unplug and start the car (if you don’t have a garage) to warm it up.  While the car is thawing, get everyone decked out in arctic gear from head to toe.  Load up and slide to the store. Debate whether to leave car running and risk theft, or turn it off and do your shopping as a mad dash. Get everyone inside and unzipped so they don’t sweat to death while shopping.  Rush around buying ridiculously priced food and so-so produce and check out.  Dress kids again, then give them whiplash trying to pull the grocery cart across the frozen, rutted, bumpy parking lot. Unload into trunk, then sit down on hard as a rock car seat because you turned the car off and everything is frozen. Slide home on icy roads.  You see where this is going. The dressing and undressing so that no one gets frostbite.  The elements constantly working against you.  Did I mention that it’s also midnight dark almost all day and night? Don’t get me wrong, I love winter. I love snow.  But I do not love constant darkness and fifty below zero and trying to accomplish every day tasks in weather not meant for humans. Obviously, that wasn’t all winter. Lots of days hovered in the twenty to thirty below zero range. I remember my in-laws coming for a Christmas visit and my father-in-law delighting in tossing a hot cup of coffee into the air to watch it come back down in frozen crystals. Even in the brief but beautiful summers the conveniences that we take for granted here in the lower 48 weren’t available and if they were there was sticker shock.  My friends in Fairbanks still complain about prices, conveniences, lack of goods,etc.   They take great pride in the moose, aurora, and bone-chilling cold.  I don’t want to burst their bubbles and tell them that you can get all of that in Maine, Minnesota, North Dakota, and other northern states AND get Amazon Prime and affordable household goods.  You don’t have to prove anything. So where am I going with this rambling blog? I’m looking for home.  Most people feel a pull toward home, a place or a state.  I don’t. Well, I kind of do...but it’s more for a time and a people.  I miss Weiser, Idaho where we lived for a year with my grandparents while my dad was in Korea.  We also visited every chance we got, mostly when we were transferring between bases.  Those were the safest, happiest, most wonderful times in my life. Grandma and Grandpa’s place was paradise.   But that’s all gone now.  their house and land was sold long ago and it’s now run down and the big shade trees are gone, so are Grandma’s magical gardens.  If I returned to Weiser it wouldn’t be to that cinnamon scented house of love where I slept in an attic bedroom with lace curtains.  I do like Idaho a lot, but it wouldn’t feel like home. I’ve mentioned before that I have a real affection for the town of Wamego in Kansas.  It’s just right.  Situated between Manhattan(about 15 minutes) and Topeka (about 30 minutes) and with Kansas City a bit further east (a bit over an hour) it’s a Norman Rockwell town that takes pride in a charming downtown, a good school system, and being neighborly.  It’s the heartland.  We’ve visited three times and Wamego always comes up when we talk about where we’d like to be. I confess, I love the prairie. Always have.  The politics of Kansas are a hot mess.  I don’t mean that they’re red and I’m blue, I mean that the Kansas GOP has basically bankrupted the state.  I can live in a red state, though I’d love to live in a blue one, but I can’t live in a state devoid of services, money for schools, roads,etc.  I’m keeping a watchful eye on their governor’s race - will they elect Laura Kelly, a woman and democrat who has been a four term state senator and fought Brownback’s destructive policies...or Kobach, Brownback’s right hand man?  I met Brownback at a Wamego 4th of July parade before I knew who he was and every cell in my body screamed DANGER.  You know how sometimes your gut tells you before your brain has a chance to figure things out?  That.  If Kansas votes Kelly, my faith will be restored.  But it’s not home.  We also love Keene, the town in New Hampshire that hosts the fabulous pumpkin festival.  We always walk the towns we like, checking out libraries and other spots, and we always go into grocery stores and compare prices. Keene ticks all of my boxes for a sweet, interesting, walkable, smart city.  Their library was beautiful!  That tells you a lot about a population.  If the library is active it speaks highly of a town.  Property taxes were a little high in Keene, and it’s really not close to any decent airports for Mickey.  Manchester’s small airport is about an hour and twenty minutes away and Boston is almost 2 hours (probably more with traffic).   Granted, we’d probably be retired so maybe that’s not as big of an issue.  Still, we’ll want to see family and that makes it harder for everyone involved.  Keene is beautiful, and it is surrounded by New England’s best - sugar maple farms and covered bridges, and has four beautiful seasons.  Keene is Mickey’s number one choice, but.....you guessed it, it’s not home. I like so many of the small towns outside of Minneapolis (and it’s a blue state!),  and the state of Minnesota ranks sky high in just about every way that matters - great health care, great education system, great economy, and so on.  They’re smart cookies up there.  Admittedly, the biggest draw is that Matt lives up there, but there’s no guarantee he’ll stay.  He’ll be off wherever the scariest diseases live.  Minnesota is at the top of my list though, I really like the people there.  I like coastal Maine, not so much inland Maine.  Sadly their economy is in such a downward spiral that the state is in a depression with no end in sight.  I think they’re ranked 47th in the nation for economic growth and their numbers are stagnant.   It’s weird, Maine’s neighboring states are thriving while their governor sticks to his guns and guts the coffers.   I’ve read article after article showing that the Portland area of southeast Maine is recovering and growing but rural Maine is being left behind.  Businesses are closing, services are being cut, there’s no job creation,  and no one seems to be taking action. Towns are shrinking and doctors, dentists, teachers, and other important services are lost. So...we could probably pick up real estate for a song, but living there might be hard for a retired person. I think I’ll just visit and eat their lobster.    We could just stay put.  Life in Tennessee is certainly affordable.  No state income tax, though we do have a hefty sales tax (here in Wilson County we pay ten cents on a dollar).  Real estate is still affordable - though again, here in Wilson County it has skyrocketed.  If you don’t mine living deep, I mean deep, in Trump country where the religious hypocrisy runs high and tolerance is low - this might be your place.  I didn’t pick it, but I’ve made the best of it for over twenty-five years.  I reached my limit years ago, but the mister has recently started complaining about the heat so maybe we’ll get out after all.  Nashville is twenty minutes and a whole world away.  Maybe if we were young people living downtown we’d see a different Tennessee - Davidson County usually goes blue, a small dot in a deeply red state. Here in Mt. Juliet one of the first things people ask you is where you go to church.  Two weeks ago I went to get my mammogram and the woman who took my information was very chatty.  I engaged and we were yukking it up. As I left her desk to sit down and wait to be called, she said, “You are just precious, where do you go to church?”  When I answered that I don’t belong to a particular church her face fell and that was the end of her friendliness.  No doubt she needed to know which part of the hierarchy I belonged to...the large population of Baptists and Church of Christ followers seem to have a running battle to see who can out holy the other and who can recruit the most new members.  Methodists are pretty cool and there’s even a handful of Lutherans here who won’t bother you at all.   Tennessee is growing by leaps and bounds and has one of the hottest real estate markets in the country thanks to it being a retirement haven.  Low prices, low taxes, low standards.   Ahahahaha!  We have all the services we need at our fingertips, and we can be at the beach or in the mountains in just a few hours.  Definite positives.  We don’t have four nice seasons though - we have an excruciating summer, a beautiful but quick fall, a gray,wet,ugly winter, and a soggy, tornado-ridden spring.  Actually, I’m not complaining about spring - I love big thunderstorms and severe weather.  As long as the power stays on it can thunder and lightning for days and I’m okay. So what do we do? Stay? Go?  Keep looking? We both liked what we saw in a week in South Dakota. Do we look until we’re too old to move?  If we could snap our fingers and just live where we’d like, we’d both go to The Netherlands.  We feel at home there, pretty sad when I feel like a visitor in so many places in the U.S.  My soul feels at home in Salem.  I feel at home when I stand on the prairie and look at the huge sky and rolling hills.  I guess it all comes back to not being FROM anywhere.  In Maine, there are Mainers and outsiders.  It’s very clear.  In Minnesota they’re warm and welcoming, but there are customs, foods, traditions, and basic traits that make one a Minnesotan - I don’t possess any of them, though I don’t think they’d care. I’d just always feel like a visitor.  I didn’t feel that in Kansas, they’re good salt of the earth people, not nosy enough to ask where you’re from or where you go to church.  New Hampshire was the same way.  There didn’t seem to be a divide between born here and moved here folks. I’ve been in Tennessee since ‘93 and I’m still not considered a local.  I’m okay with that.  Not having picked up the customs and quirks of a state or even a region, I can’t really claim a “home”.  If pressed I’d probably say Alaska because that’s where I experienced everything from childhood skinned knees to birthing a baby.  But I can’t say that if I stepped off a plane there tomorrow I’d take a deep breath and say, “Ahhh, home!”  Moving to a new home every two to three years during my formative years made me resilient, it made me friendly.  I make friends easily, but I don’t get too attached - and getting me to really open up, well...

It also gave me a good attitude toward not-so-good places.  Even if you can’t find something positive, hey - you’ll only have to endure it for a couple years, right? (twenty-five years later...)  It gave me the gift of curiosity and of emotional self-sufficiency.  It just didn’t give me a hometown.    So I’m looking, always looking.  I spend hours scouring real estate and then looking up information on citydata.com and other sites.  If I ever move I’ll know more about the place than the folks who already live there.   

Thanks for listening to my scatter-brained ramblings today.  There’s no point to any of this, really.  I yearn for a place that doesn’t exist.  I long for home, but I suppose it’s all in my mind - some magical place that fits and feels right.   I wonder how many people actually have that.  I wonder how many need it?  I’ve spent a lifetime blooming where planted, and I think that’s a crucial skill.  I’m certainly not knocking it.  I just wonder what it feels like to be the plant who gets placed in the perfect environment for growth and health.  Please don’t mistake this post for sorrow or a cry for help - it’s not.  It’s really more of a thinking out loud sort of thing.   Just pondering, trying to work out whether it’s safer to stay put or make a leap.  Will any place be better than the last?  Who knows?  I do know that there are places where being authentic is easier than others.   Guess I’ll just keep looking...any hints?

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