I bought a few plane tickets and booked a couple car rentals this week. I can’t remember when I’ve felt so excited. Well, at least in the last year.
See, the last year has been filled with moving plans, buying furniture, adopting a dog, buying a house and starting a new job.
While all of these things are exciting in context, at my age they have produced unwanted anxiety to the level that I’ve never felt before; although all self-inflicted. While anxious, travel and and seeing new places is the last thing on my mind.
However, as things have settled down, one of the things that makes me want to travel is reading. After a period of stress and watching too much television, I have a thought about a book. I find a book on my bookshelf, or in a random online search and I’m suddenly reading for hours – I’m back to the self I like.
The reading frenzy started with Thomas Wolfe and Look Homeward, Angel; a book I read 20 years ago and fell in love with. I live 90 minutes from the setting of the book and where Wolfe grew up. I drove over to Asheville and walked around Old Kentucky Home.
I started reading his biographies and literary scholarship. I fell in love with him again. But reading Wolfe has led me back to my favorite author, Wallace Stegner. Reading Stegner makes me want to travel west, and so I booked my flight to Phoenix and can’t wait to see the desert, Grand Canyon and Tucson.
Right now, I’m on a reading frenzy. I have books lined up: The Secret Knowledge of Water, Following Esabella, Dakota, Marking the Sparrow’s Fall and more.
I’ve also started listening to audiobooks while driving. This was suggested to me by my friend Missy. I’ve mostly listened to music while driving all over East Tennessee. I live in the country so it’s a 15 minute drive minimum to anywhere I want to go except for the grocery store which is two miles down the road. YAY. I’m listening to Big Rock Candy Mountain by Wallace Stegner. Next up: Angle of Repose. I didn’t think I’d be able to concentrate on the words while driving but I can now lose myself in his descriptions of the midwest and west, his characters and their lives.
Reading and traveling make me question everything, and that is always good for me. It makes me reevaluate my choices and where I live. I live in the south and after one year, I truly like living here and enjoy learning about this region. I’m reading books about its history, about Great Smoky Mountains National Park and nonfiction from local writers.
As much as I like living here, and feel at home here, it’s always been a pattern of my thinking that I need to go away from a place, even if it’s just for a few days, to really appreciate it. I need that distance to think about my feelings towards a place I chose. Yes, I like living here but why do I really like it? One of the hard things to get used to living in East Tennessee is how far west in the eastern time zone it is; it is so dark in the morning. Right now, the sunrise is at 6:45 am and can’t walk dogs or run in pitch black for safety; from wildlife or crazy people.
Distance helps me sort out complicated feelings of home, place and choices. In the last 25 years, home has always been where my dogs are. Could this be my forever home, a place I own and where all my stuff is?
I’ve been told that if you don’t own a home you are considered homeless by the government. All these years I’ve been homeless while searching for my forever place. So there is this to think about while traveling and walking around the desert.
I do know that as soon as I start writing packing lists and preparing dogs for the kennel my travel anxiety will begin. As much as I love being away from home, or the place I live, I will miss it and can’t wait to get back home again.
