reality of a changed world

We are just days from closing on our new home. And...while I am extremely excited about the house I'm not so happy about leaving my friends and husband in NC....not to mention leaving the ocean. It's kind of my sanity and calming oasis.

I am excited to set up a new home...unpack thousands of boxes....arrange furniture...purchase furniture and have a place that is all our own. It's the whole leaving a place I love part that is throwing a damper on the situation.

I am stuck between two worlds. The first is my current location. I live near the ocean and hear the quiet waves beat upon the shore each time I leave the house. I also life in a place in which husband and I started our married lives together. We have made it on our own here for 6 years...come next week. We relied upon each other which really strengthened our relationship.

Here, we can hull ourselves in the house for weeks without hearing from anyone. No friends pop by or drop in....very few phone calls and usually no one notices if we leave for the weekend. It's rather quiet.

Don't get me wrong, I have made some of the most meaningful friendships while living here. It is just that here....friends as well as ourselves have lives. We each have children to care for and jobs of one kind or another that keep us busy. There isn't a lot of time to just hang at each other's homes. Then again, maybe there is and we just don't do it. I don't know.

The other world is much different. There is no ocean yet amazingly beautiful mountains. In this world family lives just a few miles away and could pop in at any moment. There are friends we've known most of our lives that are more like family than some family. They are the type of friends who stop by and make themselves comfortable in your home as if it were their own...ones that would use the back door rather than the front.

It is a world in which everyone knows about your life, sometimes they know more than you know and use it for conversation. Small town gossip type of thing. It's a world in which the poor and disadvantaged life next door to the upper middle class. Run down trailer right next to $250,000 home. It's inescapable. You leave your house and it is thrown in your face.

I suppose while living in WV I was rather blind to this, accepting it as just life and nothing more. Now 6 years later, it screams to me as I drive by. It talks to me as I leave church and am asked if I have money to spare. It's everywhere.

My ocean world is quiet. One must search for the poor and disadvantaged. They are not so easily seen. Yet, in my mountain world you can't escape them. The only problem is that in that mountain world too often the poor aren't helped because that run down shack has raised 3 generations of family and they wouldn't have it any other way.

Helping, which is what I feel is my calling, can be rather difficult when what you see with your eyes isn't always what it seems. Poor these people may be, uneducated...maybe, helpless.....loudly no.

I suppose the hardest part about this move is that it's different. Different than the mountain home I remember. Different because memories are often part illusion. Hard because I'm unsure of my place among the masses. Hard, because moving means starting over in a place that requires dealing with some repressed emotions.

If only I could find a way to have the new house, my mom, and select others move here.

Or just maybe....this is one of those "road less traveled" things and it's going to "make all the difference".

Time will tell and if you are interested.....I'll bring you along, one blog at a time.