Eastern Migration

I go to nature to be soothed and healed,
And to have my senses put in tune once more.

-- John Burroughs

We are going home.

Not to Boulder. And not to visit. As Dane put it, “We’re going home, Hanna. And we’re going to live on your mountain.”

Yes, my mountain. Where mountain laurel trunks grow as thick as my lower leg; where there are carpets of neon green moss; and where you look down on a sea of fog in the mornings. We are going to live there. We are going to listen to owls and wind in tree leaves. We're going to see the Milky Way on clear nights. We're going to hunt crawdads and salamanders in the creeks. We're all going to breathe a little easier. Or perhaps a lot easier.

I generally try to keep this blog fairly positive -- I generally try to be positive. So I will say simply that the last year has been hard. Not hard like what our grandparents experienced living through the Depression, or anything like that. Just day-in day-out caring-for-two-infants stretched-too-thin hard. Since the first time I went to the hospital, 23 weeks pregnant and having regular contractions, we have lived mini-crisis to mini-crisis. Pre-term labor, bed rest, drugs, more preterm labor, the c-section, the NICU, adjusting to having two babies at home, my return to work, Duncan's staph infection, Dane working at home through all of this, Dane's return to outside work, day care, colds, croup, ear infections, no sleep. No single thing was a big problem, but collectively it has all taken a big toll. It has been hard to remember to live joyfully. It has been hard to remember that underwear go on the inside of pants. So, we are leaving California, and going where we can have help and live better.

I am opting not to renew my fellowship at NASA to do this, and I have a number of concerns and regrets on that front. However, between the details of my fellowship and the general condition of the economy, Dane and I weren't able to make enough money to support our family in Silicon Valley, even with both of us working full time. I wasted considerable time over the past few months feeling bitter about this and wishing postdoctoral positions were designed to be more family-friendly. But ultimately, the financial stress of postdoc-ing in California was a boon. It forced Dane and I to decide to leave, and once we had decided we saw how ludicrous our situation had become. Here we were, slogging it out, strapped for time, exhausted, losing money, not fully enjoying our beautiful babies, 3000 miles from people who were longing to help us. No job or career is worth that. So, since we can see through a millstone if it has a hole in it, we've made an active decision to have a happier life.

When we get back to West Virginia, I'm going to stay at home with Duncan and Tristan; Dane is going to work. Home will be a three bedroom passive solar house, on 100 acres of land, 5 minutes by car and 20 minutes by foot from the house where I grew up. We will have a real kitchen, an apple orchard, and grape arbors. We will have space, both mental and physical, that we have been lacking for a long time. And most important of all, we will see Dane's parents and mine all of the time. They will get to watch Duncan and Tristan learn to walk and talk and try to say squirrel. Holidays with family won’t be bracketed by 18-hour fifteen-hundred-dollar cross-country trips.

We leave in September, so there is still a bit of a slog in front of us as I try to get as much science done as possible and to lay the ground work to attempt to come back to my career in a few years. And this is the hard part of our decision to leave. I like my job, and in many ways I’m only beginning to settle in there. I’ve begun to make slow progress (but progress!) on the research I came here to do and I’ve become attached to new friends who have helped us enormously over the past few months. Similarly, Dane has started a new job that he loves, and where he has potential to advance. If we were willing to try to hang on in Silicon Valley another year -- and everything went just right -- we might even be able to scrape by financially. We’re confident that we’ve made the right decision to leave, and we’re determined to make the best of our remaining time here, but day-to-day life is tinged with an awkward sense of regret right now, a sense of having disappointed people who helped us.

To keep myself feeling a bit steadier about all of the upheaval that we are introducing by moving, I’ve been snatching spare moments to re-read Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, and, like always, a little Anne of Green Gables. These books keep me reminded that this move isn’t only going to give us spare hands to hold the babies and a positive balance in the checking account; it’s going to allow us to live in a way that’s more consistent with our values. Career advancement is not perhaps the best sign of intelligence; living well – on the earth, with other people -- is. So, we are going home, to our family and to the woods.