Moooving

Life is a-changing in such huge ways. Just the sheer conceptual overwhelmingness of recent months has made me gun shy when it comes to this blog.

Here. I'll bullet it.
-We're moving to the Great State of Massachusetts, that fresh-faced home to gay marriage, the Red Sox, Sam Adams and my extended family.
-Lion and I are gettin' Hitched. To which I say, Hoorah! This is old news, but due to scheduling and geographic constraints the actually doing of the deed is just shy of one year off.
-We're headed to Guatemala for a month.
-Two days after we return from Guatemala, I'm starting Medical School.
-I'm starting Medical School, let's just repeat.
-Lion is starting grad school. We only have one desk. But plenty of bookshelves.
-We're leaving the place we've been for the last five years.

The Hudson Valley. Sigh. This is the first place I have made my home as an adult. It's the first place that was unconnected to my family that I really have called home and felt was home. The fact that we're leaving it has left me feeling this really profound kind of sad that is a totally new feeling for me. I've gone away from places before, several times, and it has just never felt like this. Even with all we have to look forward to, I'm struggling to get excited about our next steps. Our lives in Poughkeepsie and friends scattered up the Valley have been so many kinds of wonderful. I think part of my difficulty is that it isn't just the people I'm sad to leave. We have the best kinds of friends here and I am confident we'll keep in touch and visit back and forth. I know from my past that it is plenty possible to stay close with those who leave your day-to-day or week-to-week. As sad as it will be to leave the likes of UP and DHM, Turtle and the crew on the other side of the river, our Roller Derby teammates (ok, that's a whole other post), and Pok neighbors, it is the leaving of this place that really gets to me. How do you stay close to a place when you are not there? How do you keep it as a part of you. Our sometimes housemate, the prodigal Farmboy/Devout environmentalist of our lives, gifted us a set of white oval bumperstickers with the initials "PKNY" to commemorate our love of this funny town forever on our cars. I feel like part of some club available only to a select few. The people I know I will not lose. And the ways in which I depend on them in the here-and-now will be filled by the old friends we'll be closer to and new friends we'll be making. But the Hudson River cannot come with us, nor can Waryas Park, Main Street Poughkeepsie, the crazy lady at the top of our hill, favorite little restaurants and bakeries, chance encounters with Pete Seeger, or the shared experience of this place. The Hudson ties people together geographically, across town boundaries. It defines this region apart from others and gave birth a grand history of art, folk music and environmentalism.

Part of what's hard for me personally is that we're moving to a place that many people find easy to love. Lord knows there's nothing unique about going to school in Boston. It seems to be in many ways the country's biggest college town. And while I'm grateful to be going to a great school and to be closer to family and old friends, Boston is not much of a challenge. Poughkeepsie has laughed, "you just go on and try to like me if you can" to me since I wandered here as a college freshcat and got hopelessly lost downtown in search of the Unitarian Church. It's a place much easier to write off than Boston or Providence and the growing ranks of those of us who have grown to love it share some pride in our different ways of seeing it.