That Childhood Country

“It’s not easy to move when you’re our age,” sagaciously spoke one of the new friends I’ve made since relocating to Montana just one year ago. Fifty-five to one: If I live to be 110 it will be even.

“In certain respects it was easy,” I muse about what she has realized and add to the conversation. I refer to the living out of my dream that I would awaken every morning in a log home in the mountains, white-tailed deer nibbling on wild grass just outside my bedroom window. While I was experiencing childhood somewhere else, this had been my childhood imagining. Naturally, at the time I didn’t know how green my suburban dichondra grass was. And by the time I finally looked back over my shoulder and reached for it, I discovered a mirage that had evaporated into a desert of congestion and confusion. Me and population growth: There wasn’t room for both of us in my town. While I was packing, when old friends asked wouldn’t I miss anything from California (their unspoken remark being, “How crazy are you to move to those winters in Montana?”), I sighed.

“I’ll miss what I already miss.”

And there’s nothing quite like the challenge of a fresh start to clear out the aging cobwebs. Suddenly, you’re unshackled from awkward but long-standing friendships, timeworn but worn-out commitments, all the bags and baggage that accompany expectation. Clean slate: I will only say yes if I mean it and only shoulder what I choose to.

But how do I reconcile such severance with the young girl who once urged her father, “We need a family compound” so that we would never be apart?

After my mother died in 1995, I’d morphed into the matriarch. My daughters and I lived in my father’s house and so everyone automatically nested there—for holidays, weekends home from college, or a random Saturday sandwich at the kitchen table. That is how families should be—right around the corner. This part of moving is uneasy.

It helps that everyone else dissipated—children to different states, Daddy to Alzheimer’s facility—a move that regardless necessitated selling his house. Even if my husband and I were still there, we’d be alone. This reality comes in handy during those 2:00 AM wide-awake-in-bed sessions when I am a bad mother: I am not holding down the fort where my girls grew up like my mother did. I am a good mother: I have set the example that change is nothing more than just that. Love hurdles the boundaries of familiar walls.

I am a bad daughter: I placed my father in a facility when things got out of hand. I am a good daughter: I took care of him for years. Now I phone to tell him about the woods he always knew I wanted. I am a good wife: I shared and pursued my husband’s dream—just like in every Hallmark Hall of Fame episode and corny country song. I am a bad wife…. Well, now I go back to sleep.

“Even though no none else is, at least you’d be home,” mourns my friend. Ah, but in the case of Southern California, not so much the home I once knew.

We are expecting our first visitors from California—the same area wherein I grew up, as a matter of fact. I’ve just hung up the telephone after asking Monica what her twin six-year olds would hope and pray was in my refrigerator during their brief stay.

“They’ve never been in the open outdoors,” this working mother with little spare time enthused. “It will be so interesting to see their reaction!”

As I consider how to capitalize on the difference so that their experience will be memorable, I flash back on the vacant land teeming with mustard seed that blanketed the street of my childhood, not far from where they now live and know virtually no space or time to find it. I play the movie in my head—as vivid an image as if it were before me live; my sister and I flatten tall reeds into hallways of our make-believe mansion. We hold dinner parties, bake mud pies for dessert, then feed them to the next-door neighbor’s sausage dog, who actually consumes them.

“Should I bring DVDs to keep them occupied and quiet?” asks the conscientious mother who does not wish to ruffle the feathers of these older birds with grown children.

I reassure her that after a bit of assimilation, they most likely will find plenty to do in the forest behind our house. She thoughtfully considers her hostess who has left a lifetime behind her.

“Is there anything you miss from California that we can bring to you?” she offers.

The only material thing I covet is, ahem… margarita mix from a local restaurant and, alas, it requires refrigeration in transportation. I open my mouth to utter a “no thank you,” and yet…there is something.

I want the Rose Parade, but before I could no longer find a viewing spot on the curb. I want the beach, but the way it was in 1960. I want the heady smell of orange blossoms where there is now an eight-lane freeway. I want the oak tree that stood in my front yard, but before my mother died, the house sold, and the exterior was remodeled. I’d like my family, but before they either passed or moved away, and to have had us all born here, in Montana.

“Can you buy my childhood a one-way ticket and pack it in your suitcase?”

It would be easier just to drink that margarita.