Sunday, September 14, 2014

Another move.

I have moved again.  I joke, but only out of truth, that I am nomadic.  I go from state to state, city to city and house to apartment to duplex to rooms.  I am getting used to this new space of my own.  My pup is dreaming and twitching and gently moaning as she chases cats in her sleep.  I've had the A/C off for two days now, a blissful cold front having moved in with the rain bringing the high-90's down to some damp and welcome 70's.  To us Texans, it feels like 45.

And as I walk Roxy for the fourth time today, because I don't have a yard anymore, because I have a real neighborhood now with a bakery a block away with the best damn latte I've ever had, I think about where I could have ended up.  I think about Seattle.  I think about how this weather would be much like it would be most of the time there: gray, cool, slightly damp, and muted.  Greener, and saltier for its closeness to the Pacific.  I would have never known these people that I have met since moving here to Austin.  I wouldn't have adopted Roxy, my sweet girl.  I would not have learned so many lessons, made so many mistakes, grown, shrunk, expanded and contracted.  Would I have been happier there?  It isn't too late, you know.  I could go there too.  I could someday live by the sea.  Escape the heat.  Pack up my little life again and drive through the deserts and the mountains and the forests.  I don't know what will happen.  But at the very least, I am here, in a little home, so close to what I dreamt of when I thought of starting a life on my own.  Holding in the cool that is only going to be here fleetingly, the wood floors and wide doors and many windows keeping the air chilled, my thoughts cool, and my feet planted until December, until my short, short lease is up.  That will be a good time to decide, a good moment for new beginnings or a renewed decision to be where I am.