The past few days I’ve been feeling really homesick. It’s hard for me to understand still that I’m not just visiting here, that this is supposed to be home now. It doesn’t feel like home at all.
This is a really hard place to live if you’re over the age of 22. College towns are like that, and especially this college town. This is not one of those cool college towns you see in the movies with people wearing scarves and carrying lots of books. Here you’re always surrounded by young blond people wearing too-short-shorts and talking too loud. And they all wear too much makeup or are thicknecks. Or both.
Another reason I’m homesick is that it’s hard to find things. I still make wrong turns, even on routes I’ve driven lots of times before. The lanes change all the time and the roads change directions. I go to the grocery store and things are in weird places. As much as I grumbled in Las Cruces about being bored, at least I knew how to get where I needed to be. I get tired of feeling lost all the time.
Take today, for example. It took me two trips and about five hours to do my grocery shopping for the week. And it’s not like I was looking for really weird stuff. I had to go to six different stores to find a decent beer. I still couldn’t find the toothpaste that I like. I wandered back and forth around the Kroger, trying to figure out where the graham crackers were. I discovered that they’re not anywhere near the rest of the food; they’re past the cosmetics and the shampoo, with the beer and wine. Why would graham crackers be with the beer? Meanwhile, the guy stocking the meat counter in the back of the store watched me wander past five times, pushing my nearly empty cart, and I’m sure he went and told his meat counter buddies about the crazy lost lady later on. Then, at the checkout, the bagboy put each item in its own individual bag, like he does every time, so I have five hundred plastic bags under my sink. Grocery shopping should not be this hard.
Honestly, I expected to be a little homesick. I knew things would be different here and it would take some time to adjust. But I didn’t think it would be this bad. I keep wondering if it’s because we moved, or because we moved here. For so long all I wanted to do was move somewhere new; I felt like I couldn’t breathe anymore in Las Cruces, like I was asleep. Nothing is really wrong — I’m happy with my job and the people I work with, my house and my huge yard with grass and trees, but this is just very different from what I thought it would be. I haven’t found anything that I really love, anything to make me feel like I belong. I just feel overwhelmed, lost, and lonely. But I’ll just go take a bath, and maybe I’ll feel a little better.
I have these memories of sun tea when I was a kid, setting it out on the porch and then running off to play. I never drank tea when I was little, but it’s still associated with the sweetness of summer. The heat of summer in Roswell, NM, where you couldn’t run barefoot on the sidewalk, and the incredibly blue sky. Where you could run around the neighborhood all day and no one worried about it. And the freedom of knowing I had time. Summer was so long, I never considered that it would end in August. I just spent every day being a kid. I kind of miss those days. So this year I was thrilled to get a sun tea jar, so I can sit outside and watch the dark tea slowly stain the water.
