one year ago

One year ago, I arrived on a plane in Raleigh, North Carolina, with my family. After leaving Utah the week before, we spent some time in Austin, Texas, for my brother's wedding with my parents.

After taking too long to get tacos from a food truck in Austin, we nearly missed our departing flight, but we made it, and after a short layover in Atlanta, we got to RDU around 11:30 p.m.

I remember noticing that it seemed to smell nice when I arrived in NC. The humidity wasn't quite as intense as it was in Atlanta but still noticeably present. Tim went to get the car which he had parked at the airport while I waited with our luggage, almost all of what we would live with until my brother drove our moving truck from Utah.

We drove home but part of our bumper was falling off, so we stuck to Hwy 70 and went quite slow. We slept on two twin mattresses on the floor strapped together. We had a couple of camp chairs, some house plants, our clothes, a few toys, one pot and one wooden spoon and a knife. Not much else.

The apartment smelled like smoke.

I walked with the kids to the tiny town library the next day in a country town with no sidewalks. We went back regularly--it's the only time I've been consistent about going to story time.

Maya was learning to crawl and kept falling and hitting her head because we had hard floors, so we finally bought a rug. That helped.

Tim installed our diaper sprayer but something was messed up on the toilet valve in the apartment and it became a veritable fire hydrant and flooded everything.

I bought a damaged but functional slow cooker from Goodwill and it served me well, and we bought a lot of take and bake pizzas from Aldi. We never eat those anymore.

A few months later we bought a house and moved to Greensboro and started the process of acclimating to North Carolina all over again. When people asked where we moved from, we weren't sure what to say because we had only been in Gibsonville for a few months. It was a weird interim.

I think those fields are tobacco fields? I still don't understand the placement of fire hydrants. Sidewalks are never reliably offered and neither are road shoulders. People put bags in abandoned cars on the side of the road for some reason sometimes. Occasionally you see cars with cardboard signs in place of license plates that say "Lost Tags" with the plate number, or "Stolen Tags . . . " That's weird. People park on grass here sometimes, especially in the country, because I suppose it's not quite so weird to have grass in a place that's not actually a desert. It's lovely not to ever see sprinkler systems, though. I always felt like sprinklers were an annoying waste of water. The country is not a vast no-man's land, but rather a place where a lot of people live. Streets are not straight and sometimes they go in circles. I still can't navigate driving around.

I'll be returning to Utah visit in a couple weeks. I think I've forgiven Utah for the things I didn't like about it and look forward to seeing the rocky mountains that rise above tree lines again.