And Be One Traveler

Darling Wife and I recently watched The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and I found it to be an amusing little story. It did not have the profound affect on me that it seems to have on others, perhaps because the concept was not new to me. Nonetheless, I was affected by the story's setting.

We have decided to alter our cross-country route to cover Texas and some of the South, including Louisiana and New Orleans. New Orleans was also where DW and I spent our honeymoon. So as the trip and our anniversary nears, my longing to touch that landscape is almost physical. I find myself preparing Southern meals and seeking out other movies set in the South. These things call to me in the voice of Home.

And yet, even as I think I will begin to write about the things I look forward to rather than the things I will miss, I am again confronted by the splendors of my present life. This weekend DW and I are camping in the Sierras and communing with the Giant Sequoias. In a few short weeks, we'll be deep in the coastal redwood forest, my favorite place in California.

How can I leave this place? Certainly I have been brought to tears repeatedly by my desire to get out of here and return to all the things I love in the east, but like it or not, I have acclimated. I no longer view things here as abnormal, something I actually thought would never occur.

It's funny, when I moved to Boston, I melted into it from the first day and embraced it like an old friend. It was only time that made me need to leave it. As much as its crooked streets and layers of history will always reside in my soul, I needed more space, less competition. When I moved here, the effect was the complete opposite; I held it at arm's length as something distant and alien from myself. Time has endeared it to me.

Now I wish I could return and stay. Frost wrote, "Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, / And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler, long I stood / And looked down one as far as I could." I suppose that is what I am doing, standing and looking. If only the distance, that distance which is the primary reason for our relocation, were not so prohibitively great. If only...