I am back home now. Home being defined at Minneapolis, Minnesota.
January will mark my 16th year of living here. Sometimes when I think about that I am amazed at how fast time has gone. I was young when I moved here (20 years old) and I struggled a lot. My folks didn't really think it was a good idea to relocate here and I did what any regular 20 year old does and didn't listen to them and pushed ahead with what I wanted. I packed my rusty old Dodge Omni, my cat, and drove in a snowstorm to an apartment I found in the newspaper, that was occupied with my new roomates, whom I had never met. My dad followed me with a minivan with the rest of my belongings and what should have taken us 6 hours to drive, took us nearly 10 with the bad weather. When we did arrive (at around 9 pm) no one was around to help me move into my third story apartment that did not have an elevator. For the next two hours, I would pass my father either going up with a load of boxes and me going back down the stairs to grab another load, and the dozens of times we passed each other on the stairs, he was sure not miss one opportunity to tell me what a stupid idea it was to move to Minnesota. I remember struggling a lot with that and the only way I got through it was that I knew he'd be gone in the morning and I just needed to get to tomorrow and I'd be on my own.
We finished unpacking the vehicals and he went to stay at a local hotel and I went to bed. The next morning he came by and he met my roommates (the ones I had met only hours earlier) and before he left he opened his wallet and gave me a handful of cash and said if I changed my mind and wanted to come home to just call him and he'd come back to get me. I remember thinking 'not even if my life depends on it."
I remember that night so clearly that if feels like yesterday. And here I sit all these years later and wonder how I did make it. I worked a ton of crappy jobs, worked my way through college that took me seven (yes seven, and no I am not a doctor)years. I never lived in a dorm or went to a frat party. I worked mostly fulltime and went to school at night and took out a SHIT TON-- I repeat A SHIT TON of student loans to make my existence work here.
A few years ago I looked into moving to a new place. Maybe somewhere near some mountains or an ocean. I decided against it for a number of reasons. None of which I will tell you today.
And this is where it all ties into the photo above. In the photo I am with my soon to be sister-in-law.. or as I would rather just call her my sister. That's Sue Ped and we are in the place she calls home, San Diego. A lovely place that I can't ever imagine living. It's so expensive, it's crowded, it's so differnt from where I live... I caught myself as I was thinking all of those things and wondered if I had some of my parents in me in how they didn't support me when I needed to move on and away. I realized that I don't have to worry about where Sue chose to live or whether or not it would work for me, because it doesn't have to. It's where she wants to be and all I should do is love her and be excited about the fact that she is in nice place in the country that I can hop on a plane to go visit and feel the warm sun on my skin before I head back to snowy Minnesota. She is happy and living in sunny California, complete with a family that consists of three small kids, who will all learn how to surf and have already been rock climbing and none of them are over the age of five.
I suspect, as I look at that picture, that Sue and I have some things in common and those are things I should think about, not whether or not it's a good idea to live where she lives. Or whether or not it is right or wrong because really, it's neither.
