I’m sitting at Papa’s computer in Santa Cruz. We’ve been adrift in vacation, busy doing very little. Yesterday we met the two new members of the family, Noah and Ian, three-month-old bundles of cuteness and neediness, passed around from arm to arm. We stood watching the waves wash over Natural Bridges beach. I walked with my niece and nephew along the water’s edge, looking for sticks to throw into the surf.
But my thoughts, I must admit, are still in Fresno, at 3448 Huntington Blvd., the house we hope to live in come July. It’s just a house, old for that matter, on the same street where we lived before. Just some walls and a roof. I know that. But imagination is a marvelous thing. The thing, I think, that pulls us forward and makes us human.
We’re going to live there for the next 30 years. We’re going to dig in that dirt and plant things and watch them grow. We’re going to read great things there, and write, and work. It’s going to be our place, the place where we belong, where we’re meant to be.
Okay, so I’m setting myself up for disappointment you say. Perhaps. But perhaps not. Because I think that belonging somewhere involves a decision to belong somewhere. And I, at least, seem to have made that decision.
And okay, there are a few details to work out. But my parents have said they would co-sign on a loan, so we might actually be able to do it. And we have to sell our house in Portland. And yes, all sorts of pesky details like that.
But meanwhile, I will do the more important work, the weaving of a future for us out of nothing, out of pure imagination. So that when we arrive there, tired and dusty in July, the place can be more that walls and a roof and dirt. It will be our place.
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