No Place Is Paradise

Yesterday we got the crushing news that our closest friends here in Oregon are moving back home to Santa Rosa.  They moved up here at the exact same time we did.  We never knew each other when we lived in Santa Rosa.  Oregon brought us together.  If they hadn't been here like an anchor to our diminishing sanity, to remind us of all the things we believe in and respect, we would have drowned under the weight and the roughness of this gun toting conservative mostly religious homeschooling tooth rotting county where it is every young teen girl's goal to start having babies when she's done with high school (though if they start coming at fourteen, who's going to complain about God's gifts?).

No, not everyone here is like that.  (That may only describe 80% of the people here.)

Santa Rosa fancies it has a problem with teen pregnancies and being here makes a joke of that.  Santa Rosa has no idea what a problem with teen pregnancies looks like in a community.

Our friends may be gone in as soon as six weeks.  Six weeks and then we're going to have no anchor of normalcy.  We've made some other friends here.  Friends we love and value.  But none around whom we can be completely ourselves.  100% let down our guard and still be loved and not spark a mean debate or hurt feelings.  They were the only family here with whom we could spend time as a family.  If the boys didn't get along we didn't care "Get your shit together boys or one of you can play alone in the basement and one of you in the attic!  Stat!"  Families around here aren't like that.  Everyone is insular and inwardly protective.  Just different. 

These are friends who if we're going to hang out at their house and we get there early and they aren't home yet we can walk in the door and be at home and they won't feel all weird and annoyed to find us sitting at their kitchen counter waiting for them; they'd rush through the door and greet us with smiles and hugs like we're exactly the people they most want to see in the whole world.  I'm not sure they'll ever know how much that greeting has kept me buoyed when everything else was crumbling at our feet.  When all our other friendships here are complicated and never a whole family friendship, seeing them is always like seeing family. 

They have been disillusioned by Oregon as much as we have.  We all felt the same excitement moving up here and sense of adventure.  We were all giddy with the slightest snow and happy to be away from the bone penetrating heat of Santa Rosa in the summer.  We relished the rougher landscape, touching the wilds as you can't do in Sonoma for all the rurality it has.  And at about the same rate we came to know the darker side of life here near the wilds. 

They've had enough.  They're going home.  I tried so hard not to cry on the phone.  I'm really happy for them to make a decision that's going to improve their life and fulfill them and I'm so happy for them to be heading home to be among truly kindred spirits again; family and friends.  They're going to go back to where they belong.   I love them so much that I can't want anything better for them than that. 

I'm completely devastated. 

Our other close friends whose house is like our other house are moving to Portland. 

Max is losing one of his few close friends here too. 

The first thing I did when she told me they were going home was to check rental prices in Santa Rosa because I don't honestly know if I can bear to live here without them.  I have been missing home a lot lately too.  Painfully wanting to be where our friends are family and we're welcome to come crashing in any time we want. 

The housing prices are out of our range.  We can't go back.  There're no jobs there.  California pushed us out four years ago and we took the plunge.  I loved Oregon as a kid and had always wanted to come back.  I always said Oregon had my heart.  I am not a very sentimental person and yet I spent years missing Oregon when I was in California.  It wasn't until I learned to love my birth state, California, and found my way to happiness there, that it pushed me away.  Said "Go back to that place you've been pining for all these years!  There's no place for you here.  Get!"

Irony is the star that rules my life.

It felt like punishment then, but I took the road out.  The road of adventure, of chances, of change, and said "Oregon will embrace us!  Oregon is a wonderful place and if California doesn't want us we'll make Oregon our home!"

Sometimes punishment has no end game. 

When we moved here we observed that if we moved to Oregon we'd never be able to afford to move back.  I'm afraid it's true.  I know this now, at the same time that I'm discovering that Oregon has no place for me either.  I don't belong and the hard truth is that I never will.  Portland isn't big enough to fill this state with people I understand. 

The romance was over two years ago.  I still run out into the snow like a kid who's been living in a cave and I laugh and jump around like a madperson and know that in California I never got to throw snowballs in my own back yard.  I still love that I can legally keep chickens and I love the rain.  I love the cooler climate.  I love the forests and the rocky cold Oregon beaches. 

So my friend said she believes I'll come home eventually too.  Home. 

I wish we had a choice to go back to California because if we could I'd be packing up right now.

Even though there's no place for us there anymore either. 

And then there's this: I have become a bitter ravaged obese person since leaving California.  We were on a low ebb when we left, it's true.  I know everyone was shaking their heads wondering how one family can have such a string of bad luck.  What with the attic fire the year before that pushed us out of our house for five excruciating months.  Then Philip losing his job.  Then the hip breaking followed by the continuing joblessness and finally Philip breaking his arm.  A lot of head shaking.  At least we're lucky...(fill in the blank). 

And we all had no idea that that was just the beginning of a dark clawing into the mouth of hell.  We've used up all our resources to make a good life.  Trying to start a business.  Almost doing it right.  Losing.  Losing.  Losers.  How many ways can the universe find to say "YOU LOSE!"? 

So here we are.  Our choices are few.  We can try to stay in this house, for which outcome we're at the mercy of the bank and the only reason the bank will even consider helping us is because of Obama's administration forcing banks to help the population drowning in steep outrageous mortgages.  So for everyone who hates Obama enough to paint him as a Nazi:

FUCK YOU.

If the bank doesn't lower the mortgage enough our choices are these:

Rent some crappy tiny depressing place here in McMinnville.
Rent some crappy little depressing place in Portland.

If we get to keep our house we'll stay here for a while.

If we don't, and I have to live in a crappy ass depressing apartment, let it be in a city that while full of itself is at least standing up for things I believe in and in which I won't have to listen to people piss on the things I believe and the person I am at least once a day.

My only hesitation is that Max loves it in McMinnville.  Mostly.  Except for when he's being harassed for not believing in God.

And when he heard that one of his best friends here is moving back to California he admitted that he sometimes wants to move back too.

Can't go back home. 

Where else is there to go?  We're limited to living in communities as poor as this one.  Now would be a great time to skip out of the country.  Except that no country wants the poor chaff from the United States.

We're middle aged with no prospects.  No brilliant careers to look forward to.  That's behind us now. 

It's amazing how fragile my good will has become towards this place.  This state.  Without the temperance our closest friends offered, there is no buffer.

It's fairly telling that nearly all of the other good friends we've made here have come from somewhere else and are constantly wishing to return to the places they left  and I'm pretty sure they'll all leave as soon as their ships come in.

I'm going to cry myself out for a while.  And then I'm going to get on with the business of falling.  It can always get worse and what I've learned is that it most certainly will.  I'm going to write my book and I'm going to keep working at whittling away at this horrible suffocating body of mine until I am free of it.  I am not going to pretend to love it here.  I've defended it long enough and now it's open war. 

Believe it or not I don't regret anything.  I don't regret leaving California.  No matter what happens to us, and it's US for God's sake- it's bound to be interestingly depressing, I've learned so much by moving here. 

It's strange belonging no where.  It's like a constant irritant.

As a slight side note I thought it was curious that when I was looking up rental prices in Santa Rosa I felt a strange little jab of resentment for all the friends and family who never visited us here, I thought :

Why go back to California?  It's not like my own Dad has bothered to visit us here once in four years.  Most of our oldest friends haven't been here either.  We've gone down there twice because we missed them all so much but only three of them ever came to visit us here.  I think that says a lot.  We couldn't afford our trips down there but we did it because we missed our friends and family so much.  But if we move back there who will have time for us?  Who has time for anyone anymore?  At least while we're living  here we can all just say it's the distance keeping us apart.

No place is a paradise.

That's the damn truth.