Still Waiting

Sometimes I feel like I’m still waiting for this new place to feel like home.  After a year and six months you would think that would have happened.  It feels familiar.  But it doesn’t feel like home.  I’m not sure what it would take.

I still feel unsettled.  I’m not sure if that is the journey that I’ve been on this last 18 months or if it is still a lack of “a place for everything and everything in its place”.  It feels like I am still waiting…for something.

When I walk in it doesn’t smell like my place.  Even my nephew Jack told me, when he first came he couldn’t stand the smell.  It wasn’t familiar to him.  He allowed now that I’ve lived here for this long, it smells like my place.  I can almost pick out the smells that are different, and I don’t mean my new carpet, which certainly adds a different smell.

Smells and sounds are potent.  Some nights I wake up because it is too quiet.  No traffic going by in front, like there was in the old place.  The sounds of planes are quieter and the sound of sirens comes less often.  A few rare times I’ve woken up and wondered where I am.

Sometimes this complex (and it is not a big one) seems like a ghost town.  Warm weather helps bring out people but I still haven’t really gotten to know my neighbors.  Mostly I’m fine with that.  It would take energy that I simply haven’t had.  My “neighborhood” still feels more like my work neighborhood, where I am known, accepted, and liked, I think.

I am not sorry I made the move.  At all.  More is a feeling of waiting.  Waiting for this to fit me.  So much is good.  The commute…I seriously don’t know how I did that for eleven years.  It still is wonderful not to be responsible for shoveling and mowing and worrying that my place isn’t reflecting well on the ‘hood.

Maybe the unsettled feeling is mostly in me.  Perhaps it is a facet of grief that I didn’t anticipate.  Maybe the years of parental medical emergencies, hospitalizations  and crisis after crisis have left me not able to process the lack of those things.  Maybe unsettled is just a denial that the need to be so viligent is over.

Perhaps this is still just the road I am on.  I think I’ll try to be gentle with myself and just press on.