I feel it.
Those almost imperceptible threads that slowly tighten around you as you grow older, weighing you down with foreign words like “premises” and “prorated tenant’s rental deposit” and “contracts.” Words that suggest a new kind of responsibility: the responsibility of ownership, as well as the responsibility of paying big bucks if you screw up.
This is called Adulthood, that rite of passage that has no clear starting line except where you can feel it in your bones. I felt it yesterday as I vacuumed and cleaned our then-empty new home, filling it with this or that bowl and table and pair of shoes. Like a bird creating a nest, I rearranged all of my “stuff” until it began to resemble a living space. Until it began to feel like my own. I did inventory and marked down all of the minor repairs and scuffs for the owners to note. I tried to nurse the poor flattened yellow husks outside back into the green shrubs they used to be. I met my neighbors and wrote down the all the important numbers for the house: repairs, garbage, cable, heating…I spent the whole day running around and playing “house,” never quite daring to believe that this time it’s for real. This time, the house is mine. The neighbors are there. The desperate need for funding and work is very tangible. We are now part of the bracket on the census entitled “home owners.”
Funny thing about homes, how you can seem to own or at least occupy multiple homes in a year. Over the last two years alone, my home has been alternately a third floor dorm room in the aging brick Anderson Hall, worn through and comfortable and full of new Freshmen; a ranch-house in Ten Sleep Wyoming, population 308, where the fields and the sky and the possibilities are as wide open and free as you can dream; the neighborhood where I was raised in Idaho Falls, brimming with memories and childhood explorations; and now this house, a three bedroom question mark with two roommates, an old folk’s home down the street, a small but lovely room all my own, and the promise of a fresh start.
All of these places have felt like home at some point to me. When they were the most needed, they were there to comfort, to hide, to shelter, to strengthen, and to encourage. The transition from one home to the next has always been rough, always full of goodbyes that I don’t want to face and doors closing and opening around me. I guess the point is that a home is what you make it. It’s not just where you live, it’s how you live while you are there.
So, here I am. Playing “house” for keeps. I spent much of today furniture scouting, doing the legwork for when school starts in a few days, collecting my mail and my textbooks…I thought I would be more nervous about this particular school-year. After all, I’m halfway through my time at the College now. I should be anxious about the fact that I’m still between majors, and that I haven’t gotten to know my roommates as well as I would have liked first, and that my upcoming semester is full of some difficult courses. Most of all, I thought I should be more afraid about returning to Caldwell, the Beginning Point for where a lot of my life changed. Last fall when I returned here I felt the pull of my depression dragging me down, I felt the urge to melt into the student body and disappear. For half the year I gave in to that downward drag, and the other half I fought my way back up.
This year feels different. I don’t feel like I have to be so afraid of falling back to a bad place. I feel like I can stand on firm ground. I feel like this could be the year where I finally have the strength to look my depression in the face and tell it to back off. I feel like I can survive my classes, survive work and money problems and writer’s block and shyness. To be more accurate, maybe it’s not the year that feels different. Maybe it’s me.
Last summer I was able to ride my favorite horse, Sysco, for several days of cow herding and rides and various activities. The first time I rode him, I was told of his history, his attitude, and his tendency to ride off with people. I was warned to keep control, a warning I did not heed well enough in the first few rides, resulting in some frightening episodes where Sysco sprinted with all that his runner’s blood was worth while I clung grimly to his back praying he would stop. Over time, I learned a partnership with that horse. We genuinely came to respect, if a little grudgingly, the control of the one holding the reins. My Aunt Lynette reminded me again and again the importance of patience and getting in that saddle again before my fear could cripple my ability to ride. I learned this lesson again when I got in my car wreck this last summer, and my good friend Erin forced me to drive her car through the same intersection that held memories of busted glass and airbag whiplash—getting “in the saddle again”—before I lost my nerve to drive completely.
I am grateful for the wisdom of those who passed on this lesson to me, and grateful that despite my hard head the lesson somehow sunk in. I am embracing it right now, this semester. The more I get back into the saddle of schoolwork and college living the easier it is to learn the route. Maybe a little more cautious, maybe a little wiser, but with the knowledge that I’ve done it before and can do it again. And who knows, maybe this time, it will be the ride of a lifetime.
