“Be happy for this moment; this moment is your life.”~Omar Khayyam, Persian poet
I made it to the other side.
The 2-day move from Michigan to New Jersey was casual. April weather in February accompanied me my entire drive. My husband and I parted ways in Pennsylvania: he was driving straight to our temporary housing, and I was going to drop off some of our excess non-mover stuff at his folks. I drove to Philly via Pittsburgh. Friday night, my college friend, Dawn, and I connected over Eat’n Park salad bar and iced tea. I spent Saturday at the hospital with my uncle. He is being treated by specialists, care that he was lacking before.
I always leave a little bit of my soul behind every time I drive away from Pittsburgh. It’s my childhood home, my home-home, and I miss the familiarity of it all. This visit, I left in good spirits.
I arrived at my in-laws close to midnight and was pummeled by Lucky who shed his greeting on me before I stepped inside the doorway.
Sunday after breakfast, we went out for our usual Faretheewell Coffee at Starbucks. They shared stories of their past moves. During one time apart when he was in the army and she was a graduate teaching assistant, they’d meet on weekends at a hotel halfway between them. Many months passed, and then one night, the hotel clerk saw their consecutively-numbered license plates and said, “Oh, you two really ARE married.” It’s a shame I had to leave then because they were just getting around to stories of my husband in grad school.
Those stories will wait for another time. My in-laws are now 2-hours away instead of a 12-hour drive. The sun sets earlier on the East Coast than the Midwest, so even though I left early, it was dark when I hugged my husband in Parsippany.
More than one person from my Deadwood Writers Group asked “Are you going to write about it?” They refer to the drive, the trip the whole gosh darn moving experience. Because I’m a writer, especially because I write in the memoir genre, people presume that I will write about anything and everything I stumble into. A lot of these experiences, like driving, do inspire me, but that’s all.
Some things aren’t meant to be written about. Some things aren’t story-worthy. Some things are just meant to be experienced.
