Spring Break

Happy March!

On Saturday, I'm going home for the first and last time. It'll be the first time since I've been at college, and the last time because two weeks after I go back to school, my mom is putting our dog in the car and moving her life to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our house is on the market, and just yesterday, four different families came to look at it. All of the things I'm going to need and want and use are here with me in Rochester, and my summer clothes and things that I don't absolutely need are packed in boxes, stacked neatly against the walls of our garage. And even though I know I'll be back in the neighborhood countless times in my life to visit friends, when I leave my house after spring break, I have to really say goodbye to the place where I grew up.

I've lived in a lot of places: Boulder, Morristown, Bedminster, Montgomery, and now Rochester. I've been a resident of three states, and had bedrooms in four different houses. But as much as I bitched about it throughout the ENTIRETY of my adolescence, it's Montgomery, a snooty, suburban town in Central New Jersey four miles off of the Princeton University campus that's been the only place I've ever really called home. And now that I'm not going to have a home base there anymore, I'm realizing how much I loved it... Even if a huge part of that love was loving to hate it.

I am so happy for my mom. She needs to move to Santa Fe, and she deserves it--- her entire adult life has been spent taking care of other people, and the time for her to start a new life is way overdue. The idea of the single empty-nester packing up her life and moving to an artsy town in the American Southwest sounds like something out of a collection of mid-life crisis stories, but for my mom, it's her dream, and everything that she is. Ever since she was in college, moving east was something that she did out of duty, and wandering back west (usually in a car packed with all of her most important stuff, as will be the case at the end of this month) was something she did because her identity requires it. She's been vacillating between New Jersey and the Rocky Mountains since 1980, and it's about time she moved back for good.

But for me, it's a little different. I was raised in New Jersey, amidst flat farmlands and billboard-ridden highways. I lived on an express-train line into New York City, and as it turns out, New York is my American Southwest. I love it the way my mom loved Colorado when she lived there during college, and I idolize the streets of the East Village and the weird skyline of Central Park in the way that she yearned for pueblos and Native American pottery while she was raising me in a safe, sturdy community an hour south of her parents in New Jersey. While my mom was dreaming of other places, I became a Jersey girl, as much as I hate to admit it. I went to the mall with my best friend on Saturday nights in my Freshman and Sophomore years of high school; couldn't wait to get a driver's license and crashed my mom's car a month after I finally did. When I was sixteen I fell in love with New York City and never went back, even though, as I've been told by friends who live in the City, I still smell like New Jersey and will never stop.

(I really hope that last bit isn't true.)

So as much as I'm happy for my mom and excited about the new home that she will make for herself there, a part of me knows that as much time as I spend in Santa Fe, it's never really going to be my home. My home base still lies somewhere between the cherry blossoms of Princeton and the grit of New York, and I love it too much for that to ever change. In a lot of ways, my mom's move means that I'm more autonomous than I really thought I would be at eighteen: I live in Rochester. All of my stuff is here. And when I'm not here, I'll spend the rest of my time between New Mexico and New Jersey/New York, from mom to friends and back again. And I'm okay with that. I'll be back to Jersey, and I'm sure I'll be bitching about it all over again in time. But it's just going to be so damn hard to say goodbye to my room, and the kitchen where I learned to cook, and my makeshift art studio in the attic. My childhood is there, and within months, someone else is going to be living in it. A big chunk of home is going to be gone from home when I go back to visit over the summer.