Sarah Morgan
I’ve had a year blessedly full of work, but that volume has caused me to let my own blog mostly lie fallow. To make up for this, I’m going to try for a post a day in December. About just about everything. Funny. Serious. Anything goes. Here is Day 2.
Lucy Bellwood, an artist and author I love, writes about the sea and about authenticity… about facing down your inner demons and giving them a cuddle… and about the knots you need to know on board ship. (She writes about all kinds of good things.)
She also recently wrote about being at home after a while away, saying, “I walk around the city with the x-ray vision of a ten-year resident. … The longer I’m here the more I see the fabric of the city revealing itself to me, even as I warp its threads to match my own patchwork of experience.“
That sounded so right to me.
This year is the 10th anniversary of when I bought my home. I never expected to buy it. I certainly never expected to stay here for 10 years. Yet here I am.
My neighbor once asked why I live here when, with my job, I could live anywhere. Startled, I didn’t have an answer. I still worry about it, because even years later, I’m not sure the answers I have are adequate.
Adequate to whom? Adequate compared to what? I don’t know. But I worry that I need more of a “why.” It’s near some friends and some family. It’s a good place for me on the spectrum between rural and urban. Perhaps hardest for me, it feels like home.
But I worry that I should have better answers. That I’m wasting time not being somewhere somehow better. Whatever better would mean.
Then I realize I have the map memorized around here. I know which are my favorite places. Even more comforting, they know me. And I relax, for a little while, into the comfortable fabric of a known place, a place where I am known.
I’m still intrigued by the idea of moving… but it would have to be better than this. And I haven’t found that yet.
