Recently I posted a garden photo on Instagram and remarked about my love for this land we currently live on, for what a fine teacher she has been. As a result, I was asked why we don’t stay – we might regret leaving the family home – especially given how much I’ve expressed my appreciation and love for this place.
It was a great question and reminded me that some folks have not been reading here (or on IG) for years and years, so many may be unfamiliar with our motivations to not live here permanently. I’d like to answer that question, and am sure it will exceed the 400 allotted word count on IG, so I’ll dive in here.
I first need to back up and explain why we're even here, and have been for so long.
We currently live in Connecticut, in the home I grew up in. My parents built this house in 1978 (literally built it – they hired one highly skilled local carpenter to assist them, one of my uncles was the plumber, another uncle the electrician… you get the idea). I was a newly minted five year old when we moved in and my parents have owned it ever since. I moved back here with my family in January of 2012; my parents had just bought their dream retirement home on Eagle Lake in northern Maine, and given the ho-hum Connecticut real estate market, they didn’t feel compelled to sell this property at the time. Dad asked if we’d like to rent it as we were looking to make a swift departure from our urban home (guns in the street outside your front door will prompt such things), and we said yes. We also said it would likely be for only six months or so because Connecticut was not part of our long term plan (which my parents knew), and he thought that was great because maybe things would look up with the spring real estate market. During this time, and for a few months leading up to this point, dad had not been feeling well. He was experiencing extreme fatigue and tremendous pain, especially in his back. This was not the norm for him as he had always been a hit-the-ground-running-each-day kind of guy, with no major health concerns or chronic conditions, and only 64 years of age. We were all concerned, and as things sometimes go medically, the doctors couldn’t figure out exactly what was wrong with him for several months. Well, other than telling him he had a “broken back” (why??). We pressed on with getting them packed up, and Adam made many trips to Maine to bring their belongings to the new house. With their new house still in boxes, mom and dad enjoyed the holidays in Connecticut. We moved in here on January 1, 2012, as mom and dad drove south to visit my sister. Dad was still in tremendous pain with no answers yet from his doctors, but he was as stubborn as they come and felt determined that he and mom would spend some time in Florida with my sister before settling up north and getting to the important work of lakefront, Maine-woods retirement.
Twelve days later dad was finally diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma while vacationing at my sister’s house. There was no cure. Treatment could prolong life, which it did by almost six years, but terminal cancer would become his task moving forward. We all felt that if you need to seek cancer treatment, better to do it in Florida than the remote regions of northern Maine. My sister insisted her home was theirs for as long as they needed. Unable to leave Florida, it would be nearly a year before dad was well enough to venture north and step foot in his new home. Boxes sat unpacked, dreams were put on hold. Everything changed for our family. All this to say, we wound up staying here longer than six months; we were all so focused on dad, it made little sense to disrupt anything else. Add to that, my parents still maintained storage here in the basement, attic, and garage. If we moved out, they would have a lot of decisions to make in that regard, and were already dealing with so much. Months blended into years. We considered buying this house for those first two years, but our town’s taxes (as is true for most CT towns), are incredibly high and the monthly cost would be what most people’s mortgage payment is. We couldn’t bite the bullet. Add to the high taxes a state with no clean public waterways, a statewide policy of nature closing at sunset, and very little public land that can be explored “off trail” – it isn’t for us. Surprisingly, Connecticut does have excellent homeschool laws and has reasonable laws regarding local food production, raw milk access, etc. And we happen to boast more stonewalls than any other state in the country, which I admit to having deep pride and affection for. To my eyes, the thousands of miles of stonewalls are Connecticut’s claim to fame.
After careful consideration, about two years into living here, we knew we would not buy this house. We stayed because it was easy – for us and for them. Every few months I’d ask dad if they’d like to sell the house – we could depart anytime – but he kept saying no-no-no, it’s working out great for me, as long as it is for you. At this point, not only were we concerned about making things as easy for mom and dad as we could, we were also pretty deep into Emily’s high school years; she was entrenched socially and academically. For all of my previously listed Connecticut grievances, we did have plentiful opportunities as homeschoolers with a decent population of fellows on the same path. And I’m glad to say this is not something I’ve only come to appreciate in retrospect, I knew it then, too. I felt fortunate and at times even overwhelmed by the choices and opportunities surrounding the renegade counterculture of homeschoolers here. No regrets about staying during that time.
But now, my father has passed and Emily is off to college and beyond. Mom is beginning to make a new life for herself in balmy Florida where my sister lives, and the time is finally right for us to move on.
In a nutshell: Connecticut is an obscenely expensive place to live, with little to offer in return. Sure, it’s possible to muscle your way through five-figure annual property tax bills (in many towns) during your income earning years, but try pulling that off in retirement (I’m sorry, did all of my Gen X readers just laugh out loud after reading the “R” word?). Add to cost of living the lack of truly accessible public land and clean waterways, a fast-paced culture of consumerism and an abundance of traffic and concrete – it’s just never felt like home to us.
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I’d like to wrap this up by adding that of course we are grateful for a home at all, especially one with well water and heat and relative safety and for having any dang choice in the matter for goodness sake… but if we can move on, the call to do so has always been there, and the time to do so is now. I’ve never been a “bloom where you’re planted” kind of girl, and phrases such as “home is wherever I’m with you” do not ring true for me. You can feel grateful for the immense privilege of what you have, without it feeling like Home.
For me, home has my name on it. Home is where blueberry bushes mature, woodlots are managed, and animals are buried. Anything else is a blessed place to hang my hat for a while, and I’ve had many wonderful places to do so over the years, but Home is where our roots bury deep into the earth and out across time. Home is a place where I’ll never have to think about what’s next for me, other than a pine box in the ground. Home is the holiest word I know.