love of the temporary

Yesterday, I had to escape from procrastinating from packing by taking a walk. Home is always seductively comfortable (never mind that if I stay here a month without a plan I grow stagnate and restless, verging on insanity). On the corner of Green's Lane that stone house I always admire stuck out from the younger homes with ugly siding-- homes I secretly played in the foundations of during construction. Across the patio of the old house white nightgowns and garments were strung to dry, it looked so quintessential and out of place in Randallstown, it was only five but the house was dark and invented a lovely old lady already gone to sleep. 

I usually go to the elementary school playground at odd hours of the night and I was shocked to find it has a life of its own at dusk. Two teenaged guys rolled past me on their bikes showing off, a few kids were occupying the basketball courts for a wild game of soccer, and I actually had company on the swing set. Outside the air vents of the school, a cloud of bats was spiraling like the outline of a smoke curl. I kept watching the moon pass between layers of clouds and smiling at the people around me. My neighborhood always seems newer and more interesting when I am leaving it. I feel nostalgic about home and anxious about my upcoming travel. Lately I've been telling myself, I need to find a place to settle. ... and yet, here I am ready (well, I would be if I weren't writing to procrastinate actually packing) to leave again.

Is it only the quality of the temporal that makes a thing enticing? How do we remain in love with the familiar? David Foster Wallace wrote, "The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day." I wonder if the same is true about place and what the equilibrium between exploration and home is, what the meeting ground of wandering and being located is.

Three years ago, trying to settle into Harrisonburg, I wrote: "The untied knots can be redone. He spoke with conviction of 'a covenant with the land: eventually one must come home, one must come to rest and mix their blood and sweat with earth.'" ... and a few weeks later, "I went up the hill till the cold reached through the ground into my bones. Always aching to be discovered, always hide away. I went to the hill to pray, city glittering beneath me, stars speeding away. The universe is growing too, so maybe it understands my little girl heart. I was born into longing, a heart of dreams. Tonight I was thinking of desire in the newborn quiet between those golden orbs, of the spaces immeasurable, vast empties, my heart craves for its own expanding- pressing outward since my birth..." The human being is made of some many contrary desires.