How to Move – Part I: How to Pick a Place to Live (Post 3 of 3)

Going Home (Tucson, AZ)

The first time I moved to Tucson was in August 1998: I was starting my freshman year at the University of Arizona. I had been so anxious to escape my mother I had packed my things weeks in advance, putting a lot of stuff in a big black steamer trunk my father had taken with him to Williams when he started college. My friend Mo was kind enough to help me move into my dorm: we loaded up her red Nissan truck bed with my belongings and bought fresh packs of menthol cigarettes to smoke on the way.

My father would have helped me moved if I had wanted him to, but I was excited Mo wanted to come with me, so I didn’t ask Dad to help. He did run to Costco the day I was scheduled to depart and asked me to wait to leave until he came back. He returned with a new CD player/stereo and put it in the space remaining in the back of Mo’s truck. At the time I took for granted this gesture: of course Dad wanted me to have something to listen to music on. Now that I’m older I am grateful to have grown up with a father who valued music so much and who was so generous with me.

A couple hours later, Mo was helping me drag my belongings into the Yavapai dorm on the U of A campus. I had a room on the basement level of the dorm, with an unscreened window which faced out into a publicly accessible courtyard area. For the two years I lived in that dorm room, my friends got in the habit of coming to knock on my window and even coming into my room through the window, as opposed to gaining access to the dorm by checking in with the Yavapai front desk. Although I now understand why as a safety precaution dorm administrators frowned on this practice, I thought my alternative entrance was pretty cool at the time: I felt like the hip protagonist on a TV show.

Although my freshman year in college was a relative disaster (another blog post for another time), it did solidify my love affair with Tucson. I loved the coffee shops. I loved the restaurants. I loved the hiking. I loved that Dad loved Tucson: he was always happy to come visit and take me where ever I wanted to go. He would tell me stories about when he was getting his English PhD at the U of A back in the 1970s: what the town was like then, where he and my mother would go to hang out.

When it came time for me to leave Tucson the first time, I didn’t leave because I stopped loving Tucson. It felt like a small town and I wasn’t sure where my place was in it. I felt like I had to leave.

The second time I moved to Tucson was in July 2007: the house I had been renting in an suburb about one hour outside of Los Angeles had been foreclosed upon. (It was one of the earlier casualties of the national mortgage lending crisis.) The guy who owned it let me stay there rent free until the Bank kicked us out. I was six years into working at Peet’s Coffee as a store manager. There had been a recent change in district managers, and now I was reporting to this insufferable man who commuted in from Palm Springs every day. Every time I saw him he would take time to make fun of me for driving a Prius. I understand not everyone may want to drive a Prius, but I have never found them to be the kind of cars which result in provoking ire from others. I get along with most people pretty easily: my inability to build a decent working relationship with this guy went beyond his derision for the kind of car I drove. I felt like progressing further at Peet’s would be unlikely as long as he was my boss, and I had no idea how long that would be for.

Dad had been dead for four years at this point and my mother and I had stopped speaking altogether. My friends who I had lived in LA didn’t particularly care for my future ex-husband, who had moved in with me in the last year. After seeing these friends constantly for the first four years I lived in Los Angeles I had spent the last year seeing almost no one. I felt isolated and outcast. I was sad about leaving Peet’s and didn’t know what I would do with myself professionally. I still wanted to go back to school but I had no idea what for.

I felt lost and untethered. I thought going back to Tucson would help me find myself, so off I went. When I had to leave Tucson again just over a year and a half later, it was under duress.

Basil and I took a trip to Arizona a few weeks ago. After taking him to Tucson for the first time in 2018, I was so excited to get to go back with him once more. Having been largely homebound and doing little travel in 2020 because of COVID 19, getting to see Tucson again made my heart soar. The setting sun casting shadows on the Catalina Mountains brought me an immeasurable amount of peace. Walking among the mesquite and palo verde trees, looking at the saguaros as a roadrunner and a jackrabbit scurried around the edges of the hotel parking lot: I thought the world made a lot more sense to me in that instant than it had in a long time.

At some point during the vacation, we started talking about our respective careers. Basil has been taking counseling clients via telehealth as a result of the COVID pandemic. Even though there is a possibility life may “return to normal” in the upcoming year or two, he plans to continue seeing clients via telehealth appointments. This is also in part so he can serve clients in multiple states, as well as serve clients in rural communities. I myself have been performing my job remotely for nearly ten months: I expect it to remain 100% remote at least until the summer of this year, if not beyond.

Given we had figured out during the course of 2020 we could both do our jobs remotely, what if we moved to Tucson? We discussed Denver’s high cost of living, combined with several months of the year where it may and does snow. Between Basil’s having to endure long midwestern winters growing up and my having to endure a few years of such winters, both of us would be delighted to never see another snowflake again. We looked online to see what kind of house we could afford to rent in Tucson for what we are currently paying to rent in Denver and saw we would get a lot more house for a lot less money.

As I realized this plan could become a reality, I worried: could Basil actually enjoy Tucson as much as I did? Would we have air conditioning to get through the summers, he asked? I said absolutely—there was no way I would rent a place that didn’t. After some further discussion, Basil assured me he would be willing to make the move.

The next time I went back outside after this discussion, I looked at the Catalina Mountains again and thought about the possibility of getting to see them all of the time. I was surprised to find tears welling up in my eyes. Apparently I had missed Tucson a lot more than I had been willing to admit to myself.

This should have been less of a shock to me. Since Basil and I have been together, he has gotten me a lot of things which reference Arizona: shot glasses featuring the Grand Canyon and Old Tucson Studios; a t-shirt with a taco talking to a chili pepper that reads “Arizona” at the bottom; a piggy bank painted with a Jerome, AZ logo—just to name a few. Basil always gets me things I love: he has always understood what a fundamental role the Arizona desert plays in my sense of who I am. I have been slower to come to this realization.

We’re still working out the details, but right now it looks like we’ll get to hit the road to Arizona in May 2021.

All of the moving I have done since I left Tucson for the first time in 2002 has made me think a lot about what it means to “be home”. Between Dad’s untimely death and my non-existent relationship with my mother, the house I grew up in did not really feel like home to me anymore. The roots of my family were in Buffalo, but I never lived there: how could I call a place home where I had never lived? Other places I have spent time (Los Angeles, South Jersey, North Jersey, Ohio) served me well as “home base” when I lived there, but when it was time for me to move on, I was okay not looking back.

I like to think I have tried to subscribe to Prince’s philosophy of living in my own heart, even many years before I ever heard the story about Prince explaining to Matt Damon where he lives. I also think home is who you choose to make it with: as long as I am with Basil, my beloved husband, I am at home. Basil and I also have another place we’d like to call home one day: we dream of an eventual move to Ireland. Home cannot/should not always be a fixed physical location. But we cannot dismiss how certain places make us feel, even if we’d like to.

For whatever stupid reason, I have tried to use all of this reasoning to  make myself forget about how much I love Tucson and how much I have missed it. Before living in the COVID environment, I never saw a path which would take us back to Southern Arizona. I had resigned myself to a future where I would always miss Tucson.

I have grown to generally despise moving: putting my shit in boxes for what feels like the 1,000^th time makes me inclined to throw everything in a fire. But since Basil said he’d be willing to go to Tucson, I find myself eagerly awaiting early April, when it will make sense for us to start boxing things up.

Tucson has always felt like home to me and I can’t wait to be back there.

I hope you have had a chance at least once in your life to “move home”. Not in the sense of moving back in with your parents/people you grew up with, but to a place where you feel more like yourself. And if it hasn’t happened for you yet, just keep your heart open. It will.