Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Home Again, With Apologies

You know you've been away from the blog for too long when your mother calls to say your father was worried about you because you hadn't blogged since Monday.

I DID try to post something late Wednesday night, after newly-divorced friend and coworker Laura and I went off past dirt road farms to a middle-of-nowhere chapel (with an outhouse instead of a flusher toilet, no less) to see an honest-to-goodness honky-tonk all-girl band called, happily enough, Girlhowdy. We stopped at local tavern Taylors, home of the best darn buffalo wings in greater New England, for far too many beers on the way home, and talked about relationships -- why mine works, and why hers didn't, maybe, and what her newly budding relationship with Pete, a ten-years-younger Religion teacher we work with, might turn out like. I was pretty drunk when I got back to the empty-but-for-laptop dorm apartment, my last night blogging there, so perhaps I just hit the "Post" button instead of the "post and publish" button. Maybe the post will have appeared by now; see below, I suppose?

And then it took me a few tries to figure out how easy the dial-up connection from the new off-off-campus apartment turned out to be. One of the perks of working at a prep school with a technology perspective better than its peers is that teachers get a laptop every three years or so, much like folks who work in some business fields get to drive a company car. Being a bit techosavvy, I deleted the then-unneeded icon for auto-dial-up from my laptop screen long a go, but darcie's laptop hasn't been recalled yet since her contract wasn't renewed at the end of the year, and she still had the shortcut there; turns out off-campus connection is as easy as clicking on the icon; the IT preprogrammed shortcut does the rest.

Not that the connection's anything to be thrilled about. Back when we lived in the dorm, network access was through the LAN; during the day, I shared three parallel T1 lines with as many as 500 students and on-campus faculty at a time, and when midnight came around and the student hubs shut off their network service, I had a T1 all to myself. Such power is heady; the network is never slow, and I used to laugh at Darcie's father, living at the end of a dirt road where the cable company refused to go and cellular phones couldn't reach the satellites for the hills, a district-wide director of technology calling in to his own network with a dial-up modem. Now the best connection I get on these old farmhouse phone wires is 21.6, and the web seems slower than it's ever been.

But increasingly I know it was all worth it. The chaos of a move up two narrow stairflights in the midst of a heatwave, the lack of a yard that a third floor walkup ultimately entails, the LAN loss, the home with no laundry hookup and a basement only accessible from down the stairs and outside and then back inside again, the challenge of moving an outdoor cat into a space with no real potential for outdoors, even the big picture windows we left behind for headbumpin' eaves and attic heat -- we've traded it all for more space, long hallways the baby's learning to walk teeteringly down, privacy, quiet. The streetlights don't come out this far, here on the farthest turn of the faculty housing loop behind the well-lit-for-students campus; the stars are brighter, and the view of the hills from this big sliding door fire escape is incredible.

Today I went back to the old apartment for one last look around, and, man, that place was tiny. It's hard to believe we lived in three rooms for the last five years. Funny how much more spacious it felt when we added our minds to it.

The blogging might drag a bit, but I think I like this place, this home, after all.