snapshots

For weeks now, I have been blogging away but not sharing my blog address with many real-life friends. I finally and bravely shared the address with a friend yesterday...and woke up this morning realizing that I had blogged about my hometown (in a not always complimentary manner) ... and my friend still lives in that area. Oops.

I wish I could eloquently express my varied perspectives on my past and present locations, and how their voices argue with each other in my mind.

For example, the cozy small-town perspective of my past finds my current master planned community of carefully matched homes rather boring and the homeowner's associations are just annoying.

My present Bigdesertcity perspective finds the small town neighborhoods a little mis-matched.

One thing I miss about the small towns is the way they value their history. Here, we implode old buildings and promptly replace them with something new.

These thoughts have led me to the conclusion that my blog captures only snapshots of my life and my thoughts. It cannot show you the entire moving picture, only what I was thinking at one moment in time. My blog captured my feelings while driving through my hometown and my viewpoint from the "hospital hill" -- but it would be difficult to express how much I miss those dark green hills ... or how much I would miss the balmy days of March if we moved from Bigdesertcity.

"Home" means so many different things to me. When we fly to Oregon to see my husband's family, I say we're flying home. When I drove to Smalltown, I said I was visiting my "hometown." But when I walked in the door of our stucco house with the obligatory palm tree in the yard, that was home too -- and more home-y than anywhere on earth because my husband and my children are here.