Time Traveling

I’m juggling time lately. A week ago Sunday I arose at 4:00 a.m. EDT to catch a flight that would get me to Palm Springs in time to spend the day celebrating my sister’s 60^th birthday. We celebrated into the wee hours, or at least my wee hours.

Then, I spent the next several days in California not knowing the time, but with the desert’s distinctive light and landscape – and the company of my mother and siblings – I definitely knew where I was.

On returning to North Carolina, I came back into the less familiar. After crossing the continent, the approach to the Charlotte airport was not 40+ years familiar. Neither the Shenandoah Valley nor the Potomac River beckoned me. Pretty mountains and lakes, but what were they? Where were we?

I was flying into unfamiliar territory. Yet, I found my suitcase and car easily enough and drove home, or at least to where my anxious husband and dog waited.

We’ve been in our new home eight months; that’s almost enough time to bring a child to term. Why haven’t I come to terms with the move and why so much unease after a brief visit with my family?

For 40 years, every time I flew east from California I was returning to an immediate and well-worn pattern of work and friends. Eight months in, I am still working to fashion new roots, patterns, and friendships to help me find my Tar Heel moorings.

Last week, I slipped out of them, young and tenuous as they are, to travel in time and distance to see lifelong connections. The unfamiliar return to Charlotte and my feeling “at sixes and sevens” reminds me that it isn’t always easy to get rooted. Maybe I should take a cue from the garden – and realize that growing strong in new soil takes time and attention.

Yes, it does. I could also follow the advice of my new state’s motto, which is Esse quam videri – “To be, rather than to seem.”

That’s what I did after I got back. I watched baseball with my husband, canvassed for Sen. Kay Hagan, had the neighbors over to dinner, lunched with a new friend, and this morning spoke to a speechwriting class at Appalachian State University. That’s a lot of activity to help make my Tar Heel soil more fertile.

The state motto is from Cicero’s treatise “On Friendship.”  I need to be me.  In time, friends and feeling at home will come.