Author: Steph

The act of moving feels second nature. We have been moving every two or three years for the past decade, Damon and I, so this time feels not unlike the rest. We know the drill: Before it’s too late, one last taste of everything we love…Today, Magnolia cafe pancakes–without the kids; a muddy plod through the greenbelt basin; yesterday, skateboarding after dark at the top of Damon’s old parking garage. Shotgunning Shiner beer and watching the weather change above us. I wish we could experience one more thunderstorm before we depart on Wednesday for the west coast; I’ll miss the stratospheric drama we’re accustomed to here, but we’ll exchange all that for a new trove of earthly spactacles: quakes, geysers, hot springs and bubbling mud pits. Purple sulphur bacteria. And heaving kelp beds beneath tiny boats. I decided to unearth the kelp quilt I started several months ago and pack it with the hotel yarn stash, fodder for my late nights to come, once we arrive in Mountain View.

Wow, this is awkward. That struggling for the right anecdotes when you’re standing there with a towering armful of them, ready to topple over. An anxious pause in conversation with a long-distance friend, when you know there’s something you’re forgetting to mention.

Well, here it is, the big thing I’ve forgotten to mention: We are moving back to California. At the end of the month, a big tractor trailer will back into our bending driveway. It will rip off the lowest, brittle oak limbs that cover the stretch of pavement where Ford has learned to skateboard and park over the spot, near the garbage cans, where the chickens keep scattering leaves in their search for grubs. And somehow, when this all happens, I will be in a hotel room in Mountain View, probably still scanning Craigslist for a place for us to live.

It’s not that we don’t love Austin. We’ve managed to sink a pretty thick taproot into the limestone bedrock here, and bought a lot to build on and sunk our teeth through some great plans for our future here. And we’re keeping that foothold here. Nothing changes that.

It’s just that someone really needs Damon right now, enough that they found him, interviewed him 23 times over the course of 3 months and made it virtually impossible for us to justify staying here in Austin, when every fiber in our body was begging us to just stay put. One of his colleagues sums it up well: You’d have to kick yourself in the arse every day if you stayed. And I can’t live with a husband who kicks himself in the arse every day; only one of us can do that in this household and I claim that right for myself. For reasons that aren’t important right now and that vary from day to day anyway.

And because it’s the holidays and I’m packing and making presents and freaking out, I’ve given and exceeded the five minute limit I put on blogging tonight. I don’t have any new pictures. I do have so many things I regret not writing about over the past few months; the time has simply slipped through my fingers. I’ve instead been rewarding myself lately, at the tail end of the day, with a beer, a shameful tv program and a lapful of wool between busy but meditative needles.