My family just moved away from Nashville. I had been in that city 25 years. It's funny because in some ways it wasn't quite my hometown, not the place where all of my family lived so it never quite felt like my place. I was always a transplant. But my roots ran really deep. I found my people after a turbulent first year. And I still have relationships with those people. Complex and shifting, beautiful and deep. Nashville will always be the city where I met my love. Where we had our children. Where those children learned and grew and had friendships. Nashville will be the place where I built a house. Where I rebuilt a house actually. Nearby nail and board by board is the song goes. Except Daddy didn't give life to Mama's dream. Mama gave life to her own dream.
Our old house there stands as a metaphor. Beautiful. Handmade. Just how we like it. Remade one day at a time. I really thought I would have trouble leaving that house. In fact I did have trouble for a while. After all I had put my blood sweat in tears, quite literally, into that house. I moved my entire family up to Chicago. One giant U-Haul truck and many tears. We unloaded and settled in, as best we could. Boxes had been unpacked. And then I had to go back to finish the old house. The old house still felt like my house until the moment I walked through the door. And that place full of the leftovers of my family, bare and empty was no longer home. I cried. I called my husband and told him. I tried to sort through my crazy conflicting emotions. Without my husband and kids, the house was just a shell. The heart was missing. My heart had moved to Chicago, for better or for worse. I went out with friends that week and felt for the first time like I was on the outside. I never had felt that way but now suddenly there I was in a city where I no longer belong. I called my people every night. I missed them deeply. I worked on my house in Nashville, preparing it for the next family. And some rooms I made rubble. Appropriate for how I felt now. It all felt so transient and weird. I was literally sleeping on the floor on a mattress that my husband and I had shared. Every nail hole. Every dent. Every drywall repair felt like a delay in getting back to my people, rather than the labor of love that it used to feel like to work on that house.
The 2nd u-haul loaded with all the things we thought we could leave behind, a friend in the passenger seat and the hubby's car on the tow dolly, I finally felt like I was going home.
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