What do you do when a lifelong dream turns out not to be so dreamy?
Here’s what I do: I find another dream.
For my entire adult life I’ve wanted to live in the mountains. My first husband and I actually packed our stuff and headed to Tennessee at one point, scoping out a place to live. We were very young then, in our 20s, and as we tooled around Nashville, we just knew this would be our new home. Circumstances, however, got in the way and we settled elsewhere. Some time later I discovered Colorado and the Rocky Mountains and I thought I’d died and gone to heaven.
Once or twice a year I began driving to a cabin in Winter Park or Allenspark for solitary spiritual and writing retreats. When I would first pull into northern Colorado and spot the mountains I’d start crying for joy. When I had to leave I’d cry in grief and it would take several days after I returned home for the depression to lift.
I’d begun writing for a number of periodicals by this time, and I’d rent a cabin and spend the day hiking and journaling. I never felt so inspired, never wrote so freely, never came up with as many thoughts and ideas as I did when I was in the mountains. Soon I was writing for around 60 different periodicals, and a publisher had paid me an advance for my first book.
Years after my nearly 30-year marriage with Mike ended, I met Bob, and shortly after we married, we traveled to Colorado. Bob fell in love with the mountains the way I’d fallen in love with them and we rented a funky four-story home with seven decks overlooking stunning mountain vistas and forest. It turned out to be an awful house, though: the well broke, a leak somewhere caused the kitchen floor to rise like a yeasty loaf of bread, and my home office felt like Siberia. Bob and I moved around a few times and then bought a home on a river with the forest stretching out endlessly behind us. We decided that this was the blissful place we’d live for the rest of the our lives.
Except that it wasn’t.
The pipes froze, the electricity went out, and the water was brown. So we hired someone to put in new pipes with heated insulation, we bought a generator, and we had a filter installed that fixed the water problem. But I had begun to realize that it wasn’t so much the physical problems that had been getting to me; it was the emotional isolation. I had always loved Colorado, always wanted to live here, loved hiking in this beautiful place, but there was an essential connection missing. It had never felt like home. Why?
I remember talking to two new friends just months after we arrived here, friends who’d lived in Colorado all of their lives, and they said, “It’s the West. There’s an independent spirit here and it’s tough finding community. It’s just the way people are.” I was baffled. People were friendly and warm. We got invited to lots of parties and had fun. But my friend was right. We all left the parties, went our separate ways, and didn’t see one another again until the next party. Further, Bob and I lived in the mountains, isolated from what may have been an authentic community in town. I finally got that completely when, about six months ago we went out to dinner with our neighbors, whom we rarely saw, and they said, “At least we all have one thing in common up here in the mountains; we came here essentially to be left alone.”
That day I knew that this place would never be my home. I didn’t share that desire with my neighbors. I moved to the mountains for the beauty, for the opportunity to hike more than a couple of times a year, and to be a part of a place I’d only loved from a distance, not to be left alone. In fact, I thought mountain living would be an extra special type of community, where you had neighborhood potlucks and drank wine on the river together and occasionally planned communal hikes or walks in nature. But my neighbor understood this place better than I. People come here to be secluded, left alone, isolated.
So our movers started packing out stuff yesterday. I am moving “home”, to Southern Illinois, to the place where I was born and raised. My husband and I found a beautiful place on 40 acres and when I was there, I felt the warmth and security of being home. I remember when I was growing up, how it was every young person’s dream to escape that little coal mining town, and how a number of us did just that. Yet now all I want is to be back there.
I believe those who say you can’t go home again are wrong. Sure, most of my closest friends are gone, my family has scattered or they have their own busy lives, but I believe I’ll feel a connection there that I’ve not felt since I left 45 years ago. I already felt it when I was there buying a home, hiking through state parks where my family picnicked when I was a child, interacted with people like the ones I’d grown up with. Whereas the mountains had begun to seem aloof, indifferent, even hostile to me, the literal physical land of my childhood felt as if it remembered my very footprint. The people there belong to me and I to them in a way that no one else ever has.
I will visit Colorado again, probably every year, to hear the elk rutting, to find a place of solitary retreat, and to walk through the mountains, but living here was a dream that both did and didn’t come true, and I’m grateful for both sides of that dream, my years here and the realization that it’s now time to go home.