I am home from my travels, and finally finished emptying my suitcases enough to repack them this evening. It's Christmas. And I am going home. Home to big snows and family and cooking. Home to Oregon. I already took almost all of my Christmas decorations up to Mo's the last time I was there, when I visited Melody back on Halloween. I don't have to bring them back to Jamestown. The moving has begun. This time next year I will be living in Klamath. A good thought. I have lived alone for a very long time, but much of that time in the last three years here in Jamestown, I have traveled with Mo, or she has been here visiting. I haven't really felt that awful alone feeling that I felt so long ago when I first moved to Klamath. I can barely even remember what that felt like, the deep sadness inside, feeling that I was going to be alone for the rest of my life. So funny to me how vague that feeling can be when it isn't right there in your face.
This week, after settling in for a weekend at home and a week at work, I suddenly realized that I was alone, and that it felt great. Quiet time, even though I was working, time to knit a bit, watch some tv, write some Christmas cards. Great. And it feels great to know that it's temporary. All the angst, the agony, the sadness, the depression, that adjustment period so many years ago when my life really started shifting, all that was just such a strange phase. Looking back, I wonder about it, as I wonder about now and the difference. Life just feels easier, more straightforward, a bit more predictable. Settled. My friend Jeanne wrote the other day, "But Sue, it feels so settled already!!!! I don't know if I want that!!!" Settled, sounds wonderful to me. LOL wonderful. I am grateful.
I wrote a card to Eva, my supervisor from so many years ago when I was working for Kim. I had no real future, I was a soil scientist cleaning houses, and Eva kept calling me, trying to convince me to quit my job with Kim and go to work for her at the Spokane Conservation District. Looking back in life there are moments, turning points, places where angels appear and change the course of your life. That was one of those moments, and Eva was my angel. I am going to retire this year, something I never could have managed without taking that step, taking the huge pay cut and leaving the illusion of all that money that Kim represented, and going to work again digging holes in the ground, walking the hills and mountains, working with the landscapes again. I look back on my career from this vantage point and it truly amazes me. I see what the young soil scientists are up against with all the shifts and changes in soil survey as I knew it and again I am so incredibly amazed and grateful at the way my life went because of this job. I remember sitting in the dirt in Rathdrum and wondering what in the world I could do to make a living in the earth that way. Little did I know. Amazing.
So now I am off to Klamath, through the snow, the storms. I have a gazillion suitcases in my truck, with silly things like the sterling silver for dinner, a set of spode china for Melody that we can use for dinner. Thirteen people at Mo's table. A whole suitcase full of coats and scarves and gloves. It is something like 7 degrees in Klamath right now. I am out of practice. Long underwear, jammies. Something shiny for new years. Two whole weeks in Klamath with my kids and my friend, my cats and Abby, snow and good food and love.
Yes, it's going to be a great Christmas.
