Going

Baby Baer had a doctor appointment the other day, at a pediatrician's office in the same compound as the hospital where she was born. My room in the maternity ward overlooked a patch of green grass and a bike path that weaves through the campus, and seeing it again sucks the air out of my lungs. It's a good feeling, sort of - a happy memory, certainly - but jarring. I can't believe she started life in that building. Isn't that a strange thing to think about? That she wasn't breathing air and then suddenly she was, and it was inside those four walls? How could it be a real, physical place and not some spiritual fifth dimension?

That's also the hospital where I found myself a few months after moving here, with side-splitting stomach pain that we soon found out was an ulcer. I also went to that hospital for outpatient physical therapy back then. I've visited a crop of fresh new babies belonging to various friends there.

It's weird to get nostalgic about a hospital, but I guess this is where we are.

These last couple of weeks in Phoenix feel like this: I feel like my heels are dragging a valley through the burning asphalt. I feel like if you listen closely enough, you can hear my proverbial breaks squeaking. I don't feel ready to leave. I don't want to leave.

I used to blog all the time about the weather here. It's too monotonous, certainly too hot. I never quite adjusted to it, though I learned to cope and hate the summers a little less. (This one has been a doosey though - carting a gradually heavier carseat and drooly baby everywhere you go in the 115 degree heat is... grumpiness-inducing. No matter how scrumptious said drooly baby is.) And truthfully, I feel a little sheepish having so much emotional trouble leaving. I know the impression I gave my family and friends back home was that I hated it here and was desperately homesick for Ohio. That was true for a long time. But then we steeled our resolve and found a beautiful church and a book-of-Acts community, and by the time Aaron suggested we buy a house I didn't even blink. We made a home here.

Part of this is that I simply hate change, like most humans do. It's really unsettling to be sitting here in my living room, with gray morning light coming through the windows like it does every morning, and Jethro the dog lying on the rug waiting to be let outside, and the air conditioning humming and my clothes in the closet and groceries in the fridge and laundry that needs done and then realizing: in about a week and a half, none of this will be. We'll be in another place.

But part of it is also that I love it here. Our routines, favorite dinner joints, book stores, coffee shops. And the people. Mostly the people. Forever the people.

On Sunday I got a tattoo with three of my closest friends, a little prickly pear cactus with a bloom on top on my left wrist, and not to be dramatic, but let's be dramatic about it for a second: it feels so appropriate, like acknowledging that Phoenix dug itself into my skin, and that I'll wear it forever, along with these people, and the desert, and that it hurt while it happened but it was so worth it, and have I overdone the metaphor? You get what I'm saying. Pain, permanence, beauty.

I really should be packing instead of ruminating, but my talents favor the ruminating and isn't packing what husband's are for? Moving is the worst. Just this moment I came face to face with the reality that I'm about to have to bubble-wrap every single dish in my kitchen cabinets. This is cruel and unusual.

Once in my more dramatic days (clearly I've overcome that vice) I wrote this quote on one of my journals in mult-colored gel pens, as one does: "There is nothing like returning to a place that remains unchanged to find the ways in which you yourself have altered." It's something Nelson Mandela said. I know it's not perfectly representative - Columbus and Ohio have certainly changed, and I'm not returning exactly as I've never lived in that particular city. But I'm a little afraid of what I'll find out about myself when we get there. What if I'm not as adventurous as I always thought I was? What does this move mean about me?

Sometimes things don't mean things about you. Sometimes they just are.