My postcard town

Written Aug. 19, 2008

I took a walk around my postcard town today for the first time after a several week hiatus due to spraining my ankle. It's a perfectly breezy, sunny day and it felt like waking from a kind of coma to get back out and about again. This was my daily routine for months, and then it simply - stopped.

I love my town. Paying so much to live in California makes sense if you live somewhere that makes your heart sing, and my little town does. My baby boy and I took a walk to the post office to mail a package to a family member back home, and on the way we chatted about things (it's amazing the conversation this child can hold), while we kicked tree fruit on the sidewalk like small orange soccer balls.

I think about my home in Florida. The place that holds all of my childhood memories like building cinder block forts in the pasture, chasing my 4-H steers down our driveway, and sneaking out my bedroom window before midnight to go to a Goth club on the bad side of town with my friends. The driveway where I experienced my first real, heart-stopping kiss. The same driveway, where four years later, I watched as he drove away and out of my life forever. And where I, at age 21, packed up and drove off in Betty, my brown and gold '83 Dodge van, toward a quest for a new adventure in California... Not realizing at the time there would come a day when I ached to return down that driveway and be back home.

I've been contemplating the idea of home, and what that truly means, and where I belong. It has to be more than the place you keep your things, where you get your mail. It's the place where you feel whole. The place you rest your heart. And it's people... the ones who, when we are near them, make us feel that we are, well, home...

This place has my heart. All of you here, you have my heart. And for right now I am content to find my joy here on my own with my two boys, in my little postcard town with its sunny breezes and white sailboats that skim through the cerulean sea, and plenty of sidewalks to stroll as I dream.