Home again, home again, jiggety jig!

A veritable world move has occurred since last I wrote.   I now am located on the East Coast.   Yep.  I moved back home to Rhode Island.

The story goes a little something like this...

I hadn’t visited RI—my home state--for eleven years.  Life just unfurled and I didn’t get back since my 2000 visit.  I went back in September of 2011 to visit my love...and thought about the possibility of moving back there someday, to be with him.   I missed the people, my family and friends, the state, the weather, too, so I wouldn’t be moving back just to be with him.  Not that I doubted the solidity of our relationship, but I knew I would have a full life there.   It WAS home, it would always BE home to me.   AND there was a burgeoning vintage scene there, as well, to keep me in the pink!   So I thought, this might be a very good thing.   There were a couple more visits during the rest of the year, and I REALLY began to feel at home, in his world, in my old world, in our combined worlds.   And I wanted to live with him, very badly.  

So we said, 2012—this is the year.   And I wasn’t sure when, and I wasn’t sure when...we made plans to visit one another in February, in March.   He bought a one-way ticket with points to LA for March, our one-year anniversary of being together.   He was going to buy a return ticket, but then we thought, why not now?   I was free, job-wise and lease-wise--I had no contracts binding.   And this is what I really, REALLY wanted to do.  So we agreed—March was the time.  

And we rallied and packed me up, got my stuff on the moving truck, packed the car up with my cello, our ukes, and the cats and left California.   It was hard to say goodbye to the apartment—it was where we fell in love, where we had our adventures, where we had our handfasting, even...Before locking the door, I wrote this on my bedroom wall in pencil: “Gina found herself and Love here.  2005 – 2012.”

The cats were absolutely fabulous in the car!   They were nervous at first—Mama was nervous at first, too!--but we let them out of their carriers and they explored the car curiously and looked out the windows with great interest.   And when we did keep them in their carriers at night, they slept and didn’t really complain much.  

The first night, we experienced car trouble.   Martin was driving and he pulled over because something sounded funny.  We spent the night in the gas station parking lot in Winslow, Arizona (yes, the Eagles song...), covering up with a towel and putting the heat on every so often, and the next morning, we bought parts at the auto parts store next door (lucky that they were there!) but they didn’t solve the problem.  We brought it to a mechanic, who said it was going to need an engine replacement and would cost upwards of $3500!   Gah!    Thanks, but...um...no.   We spent the night at Best Western (sneaking the cats in!) and had another mechanic look at it.  We decided to have Martin unplug the bad cylinder and run it on three the rest of the way home and have his guy in RI look at it.   So that’s what he did—Three Cylinder Sally high-tailed it all the way across the country!  

We crossed Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas (where we got a written warning for speeding and having a tail light out), Tennessee (the LONGEST STATE EVER), and then headed north through Virginia, West Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, and finally, Rhode Island.   We were so WIPED by the end, but were so happy to be home at last!   Travel time all totaled (before and after car breakdown), it took two days and eight hours.  

And we’ve been settling in the last two days...grocery shopping, getting paint and supplies for the living room (we figured, get it painted before the furniture shows up!), cat food and litter...

Also, the cat introduction process has begun!   We’re keeping Bix and Sophie in the back bedroom, separated from Martin’s cat, Magic.  Letting them smell each other on towels and toys and stuff for now, until the growling gets to be at a minimum.   It’s going well so far!  

I’m so ecstatic to finally be home...