Not in Kansas...er, California...anymore.

Tornados and I have a longstanding relationship.

The summer I was 10, I began to have nightmares about them. Chaotic funnels emerging vindictively from black skies while I watched and worried, Am I safe? What about my family? What about my blue blanket? Sure, I was 10 years old, so OF COURSE I was worried about my security blanket. (Still am, to this day, in all fairness.) But I was 10 years old and worried about my family and having dreams of something that basically represents uncontrolled chaos. If that's not a telling indication of my neuroses to come...

The summer I was 16, I watched Twister. Who didn't?

I still love that movie. Who doesn't?

February of 1998, I was in my first (and so far, only) tornado. It was an EF2, and it came at us very quickly. There wasn't time to be terrified--there was barely enough time to charge to my grandparents' bedroom and wake them up and take shelter in the closet. Down in Florida, we didn't have the benefit of basements or tornado sirens. Ugh.

When I came to Indiana (Round One) I knew there would be weather--accompanied by the weird warbling wail of tornado sirens, piercing the heavy, humid spring and fall air. And there was, and I grew used to it. And then, when I came back to Indiana (Round Two) I was stupidly eager for the wild weather.

Last night, I got my wish. The weather was stormy all evening, but at one point, I heard the faint sound of the tornado sirens, and so I started to hustle. I grabbed Indiana, threw him in the downstairs bathroom, and hunted down Austen. I threw Austen in the downstairs bathroom, but as I did, out popped Indiana, who led me on a merry chase while I not-so-silently cursed him. No sooner did I catch him and throw him back in the bathroom, did Austen dart out. 

So, five minutes later (plenty of time for a death storm of doom to bring an abrupt end to my Indiana fairytale), the three of us were finally all stowed away in the downstairs bathroom, 

...Indiana, making safety his utmost priority,

And Austen, not so much. 

20 minutes later, after a lot of rain and not much else, we emerged and carried on with our evening. Turned out a tornado had touched down about 25 miles to the west of us...no damage reported. But honestly, after the tornado of chaos my life was for the last several years...this is pretty darned preferable.

Just so long as the tornado doesn't pick up my house and deposit it in California. 

And just like that, a month has passed. And what a month it has been--filled with all of the things that I've missed about Indiana. The food, the people, the weather, the land. The strangest thing is allowing myself to adjust to the fact that I don't need to get everything done in a certain amount of time. Always before, I was vacationing here, and had to cram in this event, that sightseeing, those friends in a limited period of time, and if I didn't get a chance, well, I'd have to wait for the next time.

Now, of course, there is no end point (other than death, but let's not focus too much on that just now), because I am never ever ever moving away from Indiana again, so there's more time--all the time, actually--to see and do and experience and taste and explore. Of course, I thought that before, when I lived here for grad school, and put off many things, to my detriment. So it's a tricky balance, permitting myself to do things at my leisure, and yet not putting them off. And it's made all the trickier by working 5 days a week, and still trying to get settled in. Turns out moving cross-country is no mean feat.

Not a day goes by that I don't pause and remind myself that I am so frickin blessed to be here. I keep waiting for the reality to settle in (perhaps it will with my first paycheck), keep waiting for the blues, for loneliness, for regret. But so far, there is none. None at all. There's only me, and this day here in Hoosierville, and my determination to enjoy every minute, hour, day, week, month, and year of it. I will live and die here, and I want to make sure that there's a lot of life in the living part of it.

No more wishing I was somewhere else, doing something else, with someone else.

Just me, here, now.

The first two weeks

It's hard to believe that I am coming up on the end of my second week at home. Some days, the routine and quotidian demands and ongoing annoyances of a cross-country move keep me from really pondering on the profundity of all that's happened. And then there are some moments when reality slams into me and it's oh holy cow, how did I manage to make this my life again?

I reckon I spent so long being unhappy and missing it here, I forced myself to think that it would never be different.

Anyway. Here are a few highlights...


The Homecoming:

I rolled into town around rush hour--ha, "rush hour"--and immediately made tracks for the place where I'm now living. Within two hours, I was vegging out on the couch with my friend/slumlord, eating pizza, watching Archer, and trying to coax the kitties out of the various improbable hidey-holes they managed to winkle themselves into.


The Home: 

I love where I am living. Slowly (slower still because of the dickhole jerkface movers) I am nesting and trying to light the home fires.  Like the last place I lived, this is the perfect set-up. My friend/slumlord travels quite a bit, so I have been rattling about the townhouse on my own. My window overlooks the front of the house and the surrounding homes, and it's pretty much idyllic. The cats are settling in, and so am I. 

The Family and Friends:
I left Indiana right around the time that MySpace, and not long after that, Facebook, became The Thing. And say what you want about the pervasiveness of technology, the shallowness of social media, etc.--Facebook has been an absolute godsend to me. I've kept my Indiana ties strong in part because of it, was able to see lots of folks and keep in touch and easily make plans on my vacations. (And, ahem, maybe send the occasional very tipsily honest late-night Facebook message.) And so when I came home, it wasn't long before folks came calling, and they have all been sources of warmth, laughter, relieved smiles, and good-humored agreements to my various crackpot plans.

One especially fun evening, my friends Michael and Anna (Manna!) 

came over to help me assemble various pieces of crappy furniture...which basically

 meant that Michael assembled the furniture while Anna and I drank cider and heckled him. 

Right after I landed, it was Easter, so I headed over to Manna's to spend the evening with them. In my long-proclaimed but little-exercised status as Crazy Aunt Mel, I helped their son, Wesley, and their friends' daughter Lucy, dye Easter eggs, and I quickly learned a valuable lesson: when parents are presented with a remotely responsible adult to help out with the children, the parents do have a way of mysteriously disappearing. Can't say as I blame them--it's a chance for them to have adult quiet time!

Wesley is demonstrating how we could decorate our eggs. "This is just an egg-sample," 

he says helpfully, and of course his pun-loving dad heartily approved.

After our Easter dinner (homemade focaccia pizza) we noticed that the weather was turning stormy, so I took off after that pretty sharpish. Which brings us to...


The Weather:

Not five minutes after leaving, the storm whooshed in--storms here move so quickly--and I was startled by a loud bang on the car roof. Hail! I can't remember ever having driven through a hail storm--and it was harder than driving through any rain or fog. Visibility was awful, and I was terrified that some baseball-sized chunk of frozen death would crack my windshield.

Both myself and my beleaguered car finally made it home unscathed, and we were welcomed back by a hearty layer of the hail, all over the block.

Since then, we've had wind, rain, freezing nights, and beautiful spring days. My favorites, of course, are the ominous storms that come up so quickly and leave you breathless with equal parts dread and excitement.

Food:

AUUUUURGH, the food! As one of my Indy friends put it, "there's no reason NOT to eat locally-grown things." She's right, of course, given all of the farms around here. I don't know that I can taste a difference, Philistine that I am, but it seems like there are so many restaurants that are local affairs, that take pride in pretentiously delicious dishes. Most memorable food so far: strawberry shortcake from Louie's Wine Dive, and the fried green tomato BLT from Sweetgrass.

Except...I'm trying to a bit of cooking myself, and made a "lightened up" broccoli-cheese soup that was absolutely delicious! It's lovely to live in a chilly place where I can cook and eat comfort foods like this.

There are so many other things that I could wax ecstatic upon--the seasons, the architecture, my new job, the plans that I'm hatching for the life ahead of me. But for now, I think I shall heat up the last of that delicious soup and contemplate the rainy day that is supposed to come along tomorrow.

This is what blessed, peaceful bliss feels like.