Hiraeth

The embrace of a new home, and the longing for the old one...

I think Seamus the beagle is still homesick. He’s gone from a northern evergreen forest biome to a high desert biome, and he’s gone from a pretty busy routine of walks, and backyard discovery among four people and another dog, to a pretty solitary life with just Sue and me. I don’t know how to make him feel better, but I do keep up the routine of walking and playing with him. Still, he’s pretty mopey and I can tell he misses being around Sadie and Laurie, and really misses Shannon. That hasn’t changed—Shannon didn’t live with us in Washington, but we’d see her every couple of weeks or so, and it was routine. He had a fairly busy life, and it’s less so now.

We arrived here in Caldwell, Idaho one week ago yesterday as of this writing. Today marks a full week since our first full day here, Thursday, June 4. What’s interesting to me is that when we left California, Sue’s native home and mine for 45 years, we did not look back. There was no sense of homesickness. We were and are in touch with most of our California family and friends still, and even get to see them on occasion. But here, we got a bit homesick.

It’s lessening with each day. We have truly wonderful friends here, and we’re meeting our new neighbors all of whom have been so friendly and kind. There are a lot of children around us, and here’s something that I’ve been fascinated by: they’re all out of school for summer, and they are almost always outside. I’m certain they do have screens and keyboards, but every day they’ve been running around, playing basketball, shooting Nerf guns, riding bikes. I dare say it reminds me of my summers in the suburbs of Chicago where we were sent outside until the street lights came on.

The week past has had its challenges. Between Seamus’s apparent homesickness, and our own as well, the stress level and sheer exhaustion of moving in with just the two of us doing the unpacking, has been nothing short of exhausting. When night comes, sleep comes pretty quickly for the most part. Yesterday, though, laboring under the stress of the move, the homesickness and the first week’s diet of food-to-go from local restaurants that was rich and plentiful, Sue wound up in the hospital for the afternoon when she succumbed to a pretty bad case of gastritis. It had been brewing since we got here and spent the first sleepless night on air mattresses, and hard charging for the next few days led to her not feeling well at all. She has an auto-immune condition that can occasionally manifest itself as pancreatitis. This is very painful, and she felt that might be happening so it was into the emergency room. Thankfully, it is not that, and merely a result of the aforementioned things. We’re eating yogurt this morning.

In the pages before this, I wrote about why we had to leave Washington, and laid out the reasons. All of those are still true—all of them lead to the simple truth that if we wanted to live back in Puget Sound in the way we are living here, we’d have to have a lot more money than we do. That practicality is hard to ignore, and made sense to us. But last Wednesday morning, when we got up and packed for the last time to drive east of the mountains and down onto the steppe of the high desert here, we were both overcome with emotion in leaving it behind.

We miss our family, we miss our neighbors. I miss the woods, the park and the little brick house that sat beneath 200 foot trees, and had 4 goldfish that lived in a pond in our backyard. Seamus misses the backyard that was full of bushes, trees, a sloped hillside with grass and a wide expanse that held something new for him every day.

Pretty rich, eh? I spent the last year in some fashion or another preparing for, writing about and talking about this move. And there are some real positives and I’ll write about those. But suddenly, sheepishly and confessionally, while we are working and want to make a home here, we are a little out of sorts on our feeling of hiraeth.

The people here are very friendly, and the neighborhood in which we live is delightfully kind, quite active and full of life. Behind us, a small farm just to the Northwest allows us to hear the peacocks calling, and the horses whinnying. The irrigation canal that runs behind our house is a source of all manner of bird life including quail, robins, chickadees, hawks, and even the occasional heron.

The weather here is far more like California this time of year than Puget Sound. We’re in a high desert climate with summer fast approaching, and so while we’ve had some lovely cool days in the 60’s and 70’s, the heat is picking up and with July will come triple digit daytime temperatures. Those fade as Fall comes round, but heat and I gave each other 5 years of space for the most part in Washington and returning to it is not my favorite thing. It’s not impossible, we do have good air-conditioning and an extremely well insulated house.

The house itself is lovely too. It feels much bigger than the little brick house, but that must be illusion because on paper, anyway, this house is only 10 square feet bigger at 1522 sq. ft. vs. 1512. It’s a newer house and so a wide open floor plan with the great room and the kitchen sitting open to each other. In other words, during football season, I’ll be able to watch a game while making meals. This makes me happy. Now that we’ve had the crawlspace redone with new vapor barrier and two new sump pumps keeping water intrusion at bay, we’ve got a very well-built, high efficiency (90% furnace/HVAC system) with a mix of carpeting and laminate flooring that just works so well. It’s comfortable and it’s welcoming.

We have in place here some friends in a couple we are quite fond of. Angela and I were 10 years old when we met as neighbors in the San Fernando Valley. Her late father and mother Michael and Phyllis were mentors and very much second parents to me. She married Dirk, and he’s as good a bloke as I’ve met and we share a good deal in common in our Gen X way. Without them, this move would probably not have happened, not even been discussed. We’d been previously looking at Twin Falls and Idaho Falls, but not the greater Boise area.

For now, we plod along unpacking boxes getting our daily workouts in the form of bringing in a box, emptying it and placing its contents in their proper area, and then breaking down the box and either saving or discarding as needed. We’re also doing the “purge” of items we just don’t need or use anymore.

There will be more details of natural surroundings and lifestyle ahead. I’m sure you can’t wait….

Onward.