The Movable Feast

[Note to Readers: Originally published January of this year, it was removed for personal reasons. We now offer this to you in full disclosure, and as part of our parole.]


We have resisted this declaration for months now. Mostly due to our aching fear of leaving the known, comfortable grooves established by routine, friends, and searches for meaningful shared experiences. Besides moving into a custom renovated home on five acres, ten minutes from Lu's grandparents' farm, the dream of building our own house on rural acreage brings this inevitable conclusion to fruition.

Five Happiness is moving. Potentially for a long time.

We search for a place to let Flicker be a mother instead of nurse; a parcel of land to put down roots; a ground that perks, (good luck in the red clay of the Piedmont); a sloping hill overlooking water: Simple pleasures.

In our world, distance is relative. We could choose to skyrocket supersonic to our destinations and reunite with old friends in moments. It takes less than a day to travel around the world. I think there is something precious about the antiquity of older vehicles of romance, like the post, or travel by steamer that befits delayed gratification in ways a cross country flight cannot. Though I am sure we will employ these to get back to our second families as soon as we can, I can't help but feeling a anticipatory nostalgia at the notion of crafting a nook in the woods with my new family crafting contact with compatriots via handwritten letters.

We decided earlier this year to move to North Carolina for two reasons: My parents live there and have a keen interest in being an integral part of Tallulah's life. We're also able to take advantage of inexpensive properties that match our mutual desires. It is also an experiment on a grand scale. A testament to a parents' keen skills at bribery by babysitting, or maybe just their talent as educators can be seen when children stay in proximity, abstract or distant. But secretly, I am fed by deep creative currents in that place, eddies I cannot quite fathom. If the plan works as we hope, I'll be making bricolage for bank by the end of the decade.

I was raised in Durham. I went to a small school I reached by foot, walking two miles through the woods from my house,playing out my afternoons amid trees and deer and slow creeks. There is a history in that place I want to share with my girls, but also with my muse. She lives there too, I think. I dunno. I have this matchbook from the Cat's Cradle with a smeared eyeliner pencil number...I might have been playing that night, I think.

All jokes to the side, we are eager to begin to set roots in a land seeped with the lineage of Lu's ancestry, as well as the nation's leader in arts in education funding. America: Weird. Beautiful. Stupid awesome. [Does proper punctuation of the prefix "stupid" require a hyphen? Please advise.]

One of my theatrical mentors once told me that instead of living where you think you should make theater, make it in a place where you want to live. That is the plan.