My Kind Of High

I've lived many beautiful places in my life.

I was born and raised in central California.  The Monterey Bay, to be exact.  Gorgeous place, really beautiful.  When I cut class, it was to go to Cannery Row, Santa Cruz, or, my favorite getaway Carmel Beach in the picture above.  My first ticket was a parking ticket outside of The Hog's Breath Inn, Clint Eastwoods saloon.  Even as a child I had no interest in settling there or raising children there though.

Off and on, I lived with my dad in Wyoming, Idaho and Montana, depending on where he was living at the time.  He tends to buy homes and swear he's settling down there, then fix the home up and sell it for a profit and move somewhere else.  He does always maintain property in Wyoming, near Jackson Hole, and that is where I spent summers and where MW, the Pooses and I lived for a while after MW got out of the Army.

When MW and I first married, he was in the Army and we were stationed in Panama, at the Canal.  We lived on a small base called Fort Espinar, and he worked at Fort Davis.  MW was gone a lot of that time, as that is when we had the Hondurans that were being scooped out of the water and detained all over the place.  Papoose #1 was a year old when we moved there.  We saw some beautiful and unbelievable things there.  We lived in a very end housing unit, our huge back lawn backed right up to the jungle.  We had a troop of howler monkeys that made their circuit along the jungle line down two sides of our house every morning.  We had a momma sloth that would park her baby in a knot hole of a tree in our back yard while she went off foraging and doing her slothy things throughout the day.  Panama is what taught Papoose #1 to fear bugs.  They had grasshoppers there that were a foot long, I'm not even exaggerating here.  It was a gorgeous, and a filthy poor, country to see, all at once.

After Panama, we lived in Kentucky for a couple of years while he was stationed at Fort Campbell.  Because the Fort actually straddles the border of Kentucky and Tennessee, Papoose #2's birth certificate says she was born in Tennessee, because that's the side the hospital was on.  I never got to see the Derby.  Dang it.

His new job took us to Colorado, the Mile High City.  Gorgeous place, once you got out of the foothills and into the real countryside.  Lots of quaint little towns I wouldn't have minded settling down in, but the towns/cities/suburbs were, at best, meh.

 Still, I would love to vacation there when time and finances will allow, really pretty place.

Then comes Texas.  We moved here in July of 2002, I think it was.  I have met so many wonderful people since moving here.  The schooling experience the Pooses have had in these small towns is absolutely irreplaceable.  The fact that we've lived places that the kids could run down the road or next door to play with friends, and those friends could show up at any time to play with them at our place, priceless to me.  Being raised in Cali, in town, you just didn't do those things.  I was never even allowed to ride my bike in the front yard.  I always wanted to raise my kids somewhere that all the teachers would know their names, and they could be in the country where they could get dirty and dig holes and have animals and run down the road to their friends houses and have impromptu sleepovers.  And that is exactly the life I made for them.  My wanting that for them is what brought us to Texas.  I feel love and gratitude for this place that has sheltered and raised my kids.  This place that has brought so many good people into my life, created the family I craved for so long, through friends and acquaintances.  I owe a debt of gratitude to this state and it's people, and I will never forget that.  Texas will always hold a huge part of my heart.

But more and more I am feeling the pull of the life I've always dreamed of for myself.  The quiet life in a cabin in the pines.  Warm wood and an easy going pace.  My dog.  The love of my life sitting next to me on the porch while we watch the sun go down over the water.  It's pulling me more and more insistently, whispering "this is the only life you've been given, start living it the way you want".  The peace.  Wind chimes and water flowing.  The smell of pine trees and the fireplace.   Hiking.  This is why I work so hard and so many hours.  I'm working toward a dream I've carried and comforted myself with since I was a lonely little girl with strange people passed out all over her house, and a mother that never knew what day it was.  I've managed to twist the road to this life, of my own accord with my own decisions, but rather than hold anger against myself for my idiocy, I'm trying to see that I still have time to chase that dream of a quiet life in the trees, on the water.

And dammit, I'm going to get it.