Treading Water Against the Inevitable Tide -- Kerry

It’s generally the utility company people who get to see me emote upon a recent move either to or away from a city. When we moved here, against my will, the movers moved me in. At the end of the day, I had gotten to know all of them on a first name basis and had been to the store twice to get them snacks. As they were leaving, I wept as I watched the truck pull away. They looked at me quizzically. I stood as the truck disappeared around the corner then went inside my house of boxes, sat on the floor, and cried for another hour, alone, like a lost puppy.

As I leave, the phone company gets to be privy to the murmurings of my heart (or now that I have lived in Ashland for two and one half years, my heart chakra). They disconnected my home phone a week early and as I was talking to them about reinstating it, for only a week, once again I burst into tears at the change in my life that I was making.

I know that this is not rational.

Leaving and changing has always profoundly affected me, I always wanted to do neither. I hold onto relics from my own childhood- old books, a musty pooh bear, even friends from kindergarten. As a six-year-old, I flung my body with a vengeance over the hood of my mother's 1968 brown Oldsmobile station wagon at the car dealer, where my parents were trading it in to buy a Mercedes. I did not want the Mercedes. I wanted my beloved station wagon with the moon roof and the back jump seat which made me incredibly car sick. I hate to change things that I love, even if there's a Mercedes in the future.

Maybe it’s the Midwestern grandparents, but even today my heart still liked the predictability of seeing the same faces every Wednesday and disliked the idea that that situation, like the rest of my time in Ashland, was slowly disappearing into my history of sentiment.

There’s only one time in your life when circumstances are exactly as they are: the present moment. In the future, this situation will never exist the same way it does now, the five of us meeting at SOU, the places we are all in our lives, it’s all going to change as we float down that river of life.

I'm going to go cry in the other room and traumatize yet more service people as the furnace man fixes our broken furnace, even if it's not rational.