Coming back home

For the last three years, Katie and I have been trying to decide what we will do when I’m done with nursing school. Stay in the Bay Area? Move back to Oregon? Travel? Focus our energy on finding other folks who share our dream of creating a cooperative queer/trans, child-inclusive farming community? The future seems wide open, and there are so many options, but now it is time to figure out what we actually want to do next. The decision to move to my home town in rural Northern California has always been something we’ve considered, and that’s what we’ve decided we’re going to do, so we’re packing up our apartment in Oakland and moving onto my parent’s land in the country a few days after my graduation. I’m filled with excitement, relief, joy, anticipation, knowing living in the country again will sustain me and bring me alive in ways that aren’t possible in urban spaces, also feeling the compromises ahead and remembering the isolation and loneliness and needing to move away when I was 17 to experience something else. I’m torn right now between the desire to embrace my home completely, to come back and settle down, to plant young trees out in the orchard knowing that I’ll be here to pick the fruit when they mature. And then there is also remembering why I left, because of the overwhelming feeling of being located somewhere really peripheral to the social networks and channels of expression that feel validating and interesting to me. For now, seeing the milky way on a clear night, building tree forts, keeping chickens, and living outside of traffic jams, crowded sidewalks and apartment buildings is going to be good enough for me. I hope friends will mail me zines and pictures and letters and come visit often, I don’t want to lose touch with all the amazing folks I known who will soon be farther away.