We had a beautiful wedding to attend this past Saturday in Erie, and I also made sure that our schedule allowed for a couple of hours at the beach, rather than the five minutes that that important part of myself usually gets allotted.
Craig went running with his brother, and so I had about 45 minutes of that time just for me, my iced latte, chocolate croissant, and a bit of journaling and reading.
I started to read a Virginia Woolf I’ve somehow not read (Between the Acts), and the morning was perfection. There’s something about me and Woolf and water. When I first moved to Chicago for grad school at the age of 23, I sat on the edge of that lake and read Mrs. Dalloway and that memory will forever beckon me.
That memory will forever beckon me… That sentence is filled with nostalgia and sentimentality and joy and grief, isn’t it?
When we left Erie, I, as usual, felt a mixture of sadness and anger. I love that lake and am linked to it forever. And yet that town, that small city, does not seem to be able to recover itself from its identity of “GE town,” and I fear that that inability to move on will be its death. Every time we go home, it seems a little more critical in terms of its health.
Remember I lived in the actual CITY — not out in some suburb — for well over 20 years. I lived in a realm of hope that turned into delusion that turned into bitterness, until I realized that I was becoming some sort of toxic version of myself and needed to move on… needed to MOVE, period. I could no longer tolerate the constant talk of “any day now” for which there was never any real evidence. (Entrenched politicians are greatly to blame for what’s happening in Erie but that’s another blog post and not my point here.)
I was born on the edge of the bay in the old Hamot Hospital.
We soon moved away and then moved back. My entire childhood would be a series of moving away and returning, over and over, as my father pursued higher and higher education.
Every time we moved away, we knew it was temporary. We would lament not being in Erie. We would look forward to the year or month or day that we got to move back.
In every school I went to in all the different places we lived, I would be that little girl, red in the face, defending her beloved home against the taunts of “dreary Erie, the mistake on the lake.”
The ache for a return to Erie was born and bred into me.
I myself have tried to move away a few times, and each time, like some migrating bird, I end up back there, unable to resist the pull… the very magnetism of that lake, my true north.
But this time is different.
We are in Columbus, and though I love it here and I love our house, this too might not be permanent. I don’t think I can live the rest of my life without big water, but I will not return to Erie.
We will find a place to put roots that has big water but that does not break my heart with its stilted ways and cliquey groups of humans that seem to be stuck in high school concepts of relationship. (I think that’s an inevitable sort of outcome in a very small city where people can’t let go of the ideas that they have of others from when they were teenagers.)
Where we are right now is growing, and that matters… An environment of growth and change that is future oriented allows for humans to grow and change and evolve into new and exciting versions of themselves.
But with all of the good of this place, it is not the place to which I am tethered. The sense of tugging can be very subtle most days and other days it’s quite painful. Visiting Erie brings all of this up for me every single time, and for many days after, the pain of the loss returns full force.
Home is where the heart is and yet sometimes home is where there is too much pain so we must do our best and find new, fertile ground (and water) that allows our hearts to heal and expand.