DC to TC

Two weeks from today, my life’s trajectory will make a major u-turn. That’s when I’ll leave Reston, Virginia (part of the sprawling metro area surrounding Washington, D.C.) and head home to my native northern Michigan (to land, most likely, in Traverse City). Maisie-dog and I will hit the road in the trusty Subaru, to be followed by the rest of my worldly possessions on a truck a few days later. Half my job – as a writer for a children's magazine – is coming too. From this vantage point, it looks pretty ideal: I’ll get to keep doing something I love, but now from a place I love. Plus, without all my work hours spoken for, I’ll have time to delve into other projects (writing and otherwise).

It will be a momentous transition. Each move I've made since leaving Michigan thirteen years ago has been a temporary one. Often the end was in sight before a stint had even begun: four years of college in Minnesota, a summer in the field in Alaska, a season on a farm in California, a year of teaching at an environmental center on Lake Superior’s north shore, two years of grad school in Wisconsin. For this latest chapter, the timeline was less fixed but not intended to be permanent. I’ve been here over three and a half years now, and once again it feels like the right time to move on. The difference: This time, I plan to stay.

So why Michigan? There are certainly other places I’ve lived (and surely many where I haven’t) that I could make my home, and happily. But none are my place in the same way. The water of the Great Lakes is in my blood, the trees here whisper words I heard before I could speak, and the shape of the land fits my feet. I don’t think sinking roots here will necessarily be easier than in some other place, but I think those roots may be deeper. And I believe that sinking roots is tremendously important work.

Back when I was working on a masters thesis (about nature journaling as a technique for place-based education), I noted a paragraph from Earth in Mind by educator David Orr. He urges us to make a conscious decision to “rediscover and reinhabit our places and regions, finding in them sources of food, livelihood, energy, healing, recreation, and celebration. This means rebuilding communities…restoring local culture and our ties to local places…reweaving the local ecology into the fabric of the economy…rediscovering and restoring the natural history of our regions…finding our place and digging in.” These words struck me then, and now they aptly describe what I’m aiming for in this next phase of life: finding my place and digging in.