There was a point when I couldn’t recall my own zip code at the gas station pump in Albuquerque. I couldn’t use my credit card because it got flagged for fraudulent use. It was an inevitable consequence of this move in particular — the forgetting where in the world I lived.
Moving back to the States after being stationed two years in Portugal was jarring in its own right. But it was the moving again at all that felt too familiar, too much of what our life had become. Moving, moving, always moving.
I’d been uprooted for what felt like the twentieth time in just a few years. I’d only be living in New Mexico for less than nine months, so what really was the point of transitioning my whole memorized collection of identifiers to a state I’d reside in for less time than it takes to grow a whole human baby or complete two semesters of school? I’m not a plant. I don’t know how to make roots in a matter of weeks. I did know the debt of the military family is to live nowhere indefinitely.
I’ve shared plenty about this cost over the years, but it’s really not my story anymore. We’ve had the opportunity to live differently for a few years now. With the renewal of our lease last week, we’ve lived in the same house for five years.
If five years were a long time, then you’d have a lesson or two to learn about staying. But first, the leaving…
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You’d think I’d be used to the spin. My family moved from our little house on Hummingbird Street in suburban Houston to rural Missouri when I was 14, just three days before I started high school in a new, small town. I’d never lived anywhere else. We lived with my grandmother for a few months while my dad finished building our house and getting the land ready for our new life there. He dug the pond, made the basement, then a house, laid down a driveway, and built a walkout porch.
All the while, I was determined to get back to Texas, visiting for weeks at a time in the summer, which was all the agency I could muster as a teenager. My love of the Lone Star State was more than patriotic pride for me. It was where I belonged, the place that raised me, the people who knew me best. Life out on the 80 acres on the blacktop south of Moberly was a day’s drive north of the place I knew as home.
Truth be told, my parents’ farm never really became home until I moved away to college.
It was where I lived for four years during high school until I transitioned to a university in a small town near Kansas City, where I lived for only three years in a few different “homes” with roommates: a dorm room, a top floor apartment unit, and a two-story duplex. I can’t even remember the names of the streets in Warrensburg I lived on now. I can’t remember the color of the carpet or how many bathrooms there were. Some places don’t stick.
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There are some that do stick, like San Antonio. It was my fated pilgrimage back to Texas, but it was also our gateway into married life. In a whirlwind week, I moved to south-central Texas to join Lane just days after my graduation and our wedding the following weekend. I rushed to make a home and a life, and the military made orders that took Lane to the Arabian Gulf within a month of my arrival.
Our little home in a four-plex on Tejeda Drive on Medina Annex held me through that 9-month long deployment, our puppy’s first months in our home, and my growing all too quickly and chaotically from a dependent college kid to an independent woman.
Lane came home to the house I’d made, and I tried my best to make room for him. As much as we’d initially shaped much of our home life around the military, the deployment drew a need for autonomy out of us. We realized once Lane returned from Kuwait we needed to live off base to create separation from his job that felt all-consuming. We wanted to build a life away from the base where we could get to know the city, avoid feeling like Lane was always working, and have visitors to our house without having to escort them past security forces at the gate.
My friend Amanda, who was the wife of someone on Lane’s deployment team to Kuwait, drove us over to her parents’ rental property on Bailey Avenue to show us their 100 year old red brick home. It had a curved arches on the front porch, high wood beam ceilings that mimicked a chapel, and a backyard we could get creative with. I fell for the Bailey house like I fell for San Antonio.
The home was mere blocks from the river, where I would bike on the path as far as downtown on a regular basis. I took art classes at the San Antonio Museum of Art and Southwest School of Art. I shopped weekly at the farmer’s markets and knew my beekeepers by name. I found a church that wrapped me in love while Lane was gone, and then held me close as we tried to reintegrate into our marriage that really never got a chance to exist yet.
It was almost like the military didn’t control our whole lives anymore. I lived like I was never going to have to leave Bailey Avenue or San Antonio.
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But of course we left, because we had to. The military, in fact, was still in control of our lives.
I knew this time I’d have to hit the ground running. The military life required I start unpacking right away. Otherwise, I wouldn’t make friends or get to know the place. I could either dig in really fast and make deep connections that I know are temporary, or I can not dig in at all, knowing I will be leaving soon. All I am missing is the pain of saying goodbye.
And the pain of saying goodbye to the Bailey house and my San Antonio community was great. But I had a choice to make, and I chose resilience. I was going to be the woman that left beautiful places and beautiful people and go to new beautiful places with other beautiful people. Because the military lifestyle is what I’d been given, and I wasn’t going to let that dictate my pursuit in finding home. Home is where I wanted to invest.
Terceira Island in the Azores is a dream. Before the flight landed, I caught early morning glimpses of patchwork green farmlands and spotted cows and tiny chapels and orange terracotta roofs and blue ocean as far as the eye can see. When I stepped off the plane straight onto the tarmac, the potent, earthy scent of salty sea and fields wafted into my nose on the strong wind.
We lived in the base hotel for a couple weeks while the housing office sorted out our paperwork for us to rent a home off base. We knew from our time in San Antonio, base living wasn’t for us. We especially wanted an immersive experience while stationed abroad. Although our household goods were still in boxes in crates in shipping containers on the North Atlantic somewhere, Lane got orders to deploy while we were still in TLF. He’d be leaving me again, this time in a new country.
We decided to go look at a house off base in a small costal town just south of the base called Porto Martins. We were told to meet the homeowner just off base in front of the roundabout the next morning. The housing office clerk told us she gave him our phone number and told us what he drove, and that yes, we should just meet him outside the base gates. I was concerned we misunderstood the directions that sounded as if we are to get in the car with a stranger who would take us to their house so we could see if we wanted to rent it? We knew no better, so we obeyed.
We could hardly communicate verbally with the homeowner, Henrique, when he picked us up in his Toyota Hilux truck. He pointed out, I assume, landmarks on the way to the house. When we toured the property, Henrique told us in broken English and some Portuguese there were Americans living in the house in front of ours, and that we should or should not use the garden and traditional brick oven in the kitchen, and that the house up the hill behind ours was the “party house”. We were indoctrinated on the spot with shots of aguardente. Thankfully, the online listing of the house told us everything else we needed to know.
We were sold on the house and the hospitality. I’d learn eventually that our home was built by Henrique himself. He is a builder, a man constantly making anything new, turning nothing into something: homes, businesses, gardens, vintage cars.
We moved in, and shortly after, Lane packed his bags for deployment on the furniture on loan from the housing warehouse on base, our household good still bouncing around the Atlantic.
I hated how familiar and sad this felt.
The island became the place where I was again left to figure out life and home alone. There was significant weirdness to living on a 15-mile wide island where cows outnumber people and we self-quarantine during the winter to keep out of the hurricane-force winds. It’s where I learned to grocery shop for three weeks or three days depending on the commissary stock, and only buy gas on weekdays because gas was unavailable on my side of the island on weekends. Once I got used to the quirks, they changed. I couldn’t make plans because the government did. This caused me to crave home more than ever. Home then was the people and places I couldn't have while isolated in the North Atlantic.
I wasn’t home, but I wasn’t bored. My days were filled with home church and small group and cultivating relationships and a garden, keeping friends' kids alive and their tired parents company. It was the launch pad for our earliest international travels. It’s where I made vinho and figos and crepes and beterraba and saudade in gardens and at tables. I made it a place where I belonged, and it eventually felt like home.
The depth of the roots and longing I have for the island match that of a decade-long station, but we moved after two years. The relocation kicked off my obsessive search for home and my disoriented attachment to place. What does it mean? Is it a place? A person? What does it feel like? What does it look like? Because it felt like I couldn’t remember once I left the island and landed in the high desert of central New Mexico for a brief stint at Kirtland AFB.
We lived on Arvilla Avenue in a typical desert Southwest adobe-style house with both a woodstove and fireplace, but I can’t tell you even one number from our zipcode now. Our time in Albuquerque feels like a layover, like a dream I had on a trans-Atlantic flight. It’s fleeting and fuzzy, but smothered in green chile.
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We left Albuquerque within the year, and despite my feeling untethered when it came to home, we lived an adventurous year in a barn, on a permaculture farm in East Tennessee, in my car or tents in the forest or near rivers on a two-month-long roadtrip through the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia, Canada. The homes were transient, temporary, and never meant to catch us for long. In fact, we stayed mostly packed. It was just easier to live nomadically than settle in when we were searching for what came next, after the military, for us.
We decided next should be school and me working full time, and us actually unpacking for the first time in years. From the age of 14 to 26, I’d moved a dozen or more times, always in search of home, and always moving out of it and into the next things. We decided we’d park it for a bit. For the first time, our drivers licenses would match the state we resided in. We would vote in elections on issues and representation that actually affected us as local taxpayers. Our cars would be registered in our own county. We would be able to recommit our zip code to memory.
We moved to Colorado in 2017, over five years ago. Our first few months were spent in a dreadful apartment complex we paid too much for to be subject to the living conditions of horrible neighbors and extreme maintenance issues. We cut our losses and broke the lease, and moved into a small gray house in Aurora, a few blocks off East Colfax.
When we moved in five summers ago, I couldn’t have known it would be the longest I’d have lived anywhere since I left Hummingbird Street in Texas, when I was in middle school.
It’s the longest we’ve stayed put our whole marriage. Our Beeler house has seen job losses, career expansions, starting a business, finishing school. It’s our office and gym. It’s been home base for a dozen expeditions and international trips. Two and a half years of a pandemic and the stay-at-home orders that came with it were held under this roof. It’s the place we adapted for our dog when she had knee surgery, and we never really reverted back. The last few years we’ve watched the world come a bit unhinged, and this place has been our refuge from the chaos. It’s known our friends, our family, our life.
They say if walls could talk…
The walls of Beeler have seen us these last five years. It’s a house that became a home.
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I’ve had a hard time letting that home feeling sink in, in believing it was real. I wasn’t sure I could trust and count on its presence in this place. Being transient for so long taught me to dig in, but be agile enough to move on at the drop of a hat. I could follow any whim or order. I was good at it. It was my conditioning.
In the last five years, I’ve had to learn how to break free of the mentality that this was just another assignment. The military can’t give Lane orders anymore. That life is long, long behind us. But the paths grooved in that time remain, in some ways.
This is why only just this May, I installed curtains (see top photo) and A/C window units (thank you, Woods!) after four summers of sweltering heat and suffocating wildfire smoke from what's become an annual fire season. The wild thing is that we actually thought we’d be likely to move on and move out before we had to break down and buy the big pieces that would make this house more livable, comfortable, complete.
I’m not especially stubborn about falling for a place, but this kind of rest and commitment has taken time. You just don’t invest like this in the temporary places with the way we’ve lived. At least, we never knew how.
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I’ll never get over the love and belonging I found in San Antonio and the Bailey house. I still long for the island lava rock house on the vineyard lot, and the generous hospitality and friendship I found at Lajes. I still want to swing in my hammock under the giant evergreen in Albuquerque, shading me from the brutal desert sun. I still ache for summers in the Missouri countryside, a cold beer on the deck with my parents and sisters, watching the pond and wildlife. I yearn for the simplicity and minimalism of the year on the road and in the barn. Sometimes I even still drive over to Lomax when I’m in the area to see the little brick Hummingbird house: to see if it still has blue trim and white shutters, to check on my big front yard tree, and if they still have the pool we built.
Someday Beeler will be a memory, a place I miss because it had been home. We don’t own the place so we’ll pack and move again eventually when, I hope, we are able to buy a house ourselves, perhaps closer to the mountains.
When it comes, I'll miss the slow mornings when I'd throw open the curtains I waited too long to hang, and have coffee on the couch with my dog. I'll miss reading and vinho verde on the back patio in the afternoons after work so late that I had to turn on the cafe lights strung on the fence. I'll miss the way it felt walking through the door after a long trip into a house that smelled like home and the way the keys clink when they hit the wooden catch-all bowl by the door. Though one day I hope we can spread out a little more, I'll miss the closeness 670 square feet has meant for Lane, myself, and Prudence. And, because I know life to be funny this way, it will be bittersweet when I take down these curtains I just put up because I know it means I will miss our life here, the days we're living right now.
Until it's time to move on, it’s the place teaching me what it’s like to stay, to unpack, to live indefinitely, to be a homebody, to hunt for beauty in the small moments. The search for home never ends, and neither does the memory of the feeling of home. It’s a feeling I like. A lot.
It took me five years, but I’m here – in the place that keeps me wandering home.
I love reading your posts! They are so thoughtful and intentional. Thank you for sharing!