The Iowa Experiment - Day #5 - How To "Be"

We're in. With the exception of the little details that make a house a home, we're in.

This whole moving process, I was in "go mode". Moving, sorting, opening, closing, cleaning, and hussling up and downstairs and more often than a gym boot camp aerobic class. I rarely sat down and surprised myself in more often than not in forgetting to even eat. At the very end of the day I would collapse like a child, using all my energy to the very last drop.

It hadn't even quite hit me that I live in Iowa. I still talk to the same friends I did before, and I've been so busy I haven't even escaped my new house longer than a trip to the grocery store.

Tonight I made myself dinner and sat alone at my kitchen table. The house was quiet. I stared out my kitchen window into the wooded backyard, the light slowly changing it's daylight warm hue to late afternoon blue, then gray, then evening black. The trees became silhouettes bending in the breeze.

Incredibly desolate compared to the rushing sounds of Chicago. The brown line el train just outside our window, the barking of dogs and the chatter of people coming and going from happy hour. All I heard was now was the light whistle through the leaves and the random acorn smacking onto the deck with a sharp, cracking thud.

Suddenly my body felt heavy and tears filled my eyes. I tilted them back, and quickly searched for an verbal explanation of what was happening to me. I switched my gaze to the browning bananas in the bowl in front of me, then to the new TV in the room across from me, back to the cookbooks and their new home on the shelf in the corner. New places for new things in a new world. A world that is supposedly mine and I don't recognize it yet.

My Mom teased me recently that I am like my father, always moving. I'm old enough and humble enough to realize it is true. If I don't keep moving I don't know who I am. What's next? I fucking don't know. I'm scared. I'm really scared. I can keep myself busy, unpacking boxes and moving this picture to that wall and that picture with this frame and run myself into a circle of madness so that I don't have to feel this way and maybe I can keep myself in a frenzy long enough till Eric comes home and saves me. Shit.

Earlier this month, when I was writing from my cozy leather chair in my swanky Chicago apartment and this move was too far away to take seriously, I proudly stated that I would just "be" the rest of this year. I promised myself that I would devote the rest of 2010 to just enjoying my surroundings and reconnect with my husband and family. I also told myself that I would take next year to "discover" Iowa, to see what is out there for me. Make an effort.

So then what about these days when all I hear is the wind through the trees and the slow chomping of my dinner and my nervous brain? How do I escape that? How do I just "be"?