It is just after 6am on a Friday. K is in the bathroom, drying her hair. She is taking the early bus to make an 8am meeting in the city. I am one of those people who find it difficult to sleep through noise and light, so I am up as well. I can hear that the scrub jays and woodpeckers are already bickering over choice acorns. Even though I’m tired, I can get up easily because I don’t have to plan an outfit or calculate which leftovers are still good to bring for lunch. I work from home, am one of those shadowy creatures of the workworld known as a telecommuter.

We are living in what feels like a monestary, a half-acre gated off from the world for a dog. All three of us humans living here make our living in occupations that, for the moment anyway, afford us the option to make the house our place of business. I leave the gates to bike into town for groceries, or to go with M. to the farmer’s market, but, on the whole, I am mostly breathing within this one half-acre. Below us and across the valley are redwoods; not the redwoods so enormous that it is possible to drive a car through them, but towering, svelte redwoods that grow in clusters and whose bark sometimes slowly spirals up in a counter-clockwise fashion. Further up the hill, the ground turns to sand and the manzanita, knobcone pine, and madrone take over where the redwoods won’t go.

i think back to all the other times i have moved away. away from my dad’s house, away from milwaukee, away from the twin cities, away from portland. i, sentimental and prone to reverie, think about relocation this way: not as _to_, but, as if i arrived here by walking backwards, keeping my eye trained on the things i know, _away_.

I do not wake in panic and disarray, as I have in the past when i wake up in a new place. I do not generally feel anxious or as if I Have To Do Something, even though circumstances dictate that it might be motivational to feel such things. I do not feel inspired to write letters, join organizations, or make birthday cards. I feel as though leaving Indiana was like stepping off a cliff, anchored by a bungee cord, and I’ve been slowly, slowly falling ever since. The bungee cord is still unfurling and seems to have some length to it; I expect that when it is played out, I will come back up.