Just one more Virginia post. Just one more.

I know, I know.

It’s just a place.

It’s just a state.

I’ve written this before, but after a trip to Virginia it takes days to shake the mountain scent off of me.

And as I acclimate once again, I write.

It’s how I process.

And so I jotted most of these words earlier this summer in a journal, after my last bout with Leaving-Virginia-itis.

It’s still true so I’m sending it through today in my current bout of Leaving-Virginia-itis.

——–

Can you love a place

and know it’s not for you?

Of course you can.

It’s surreal to visit your own former house as a guest.

Displaced.  But comfortable.

Out of sorts.  But in the most familiar of settings.

Ten years is a long time to live in one place.

It’s time enough to get attached, to grow roots, to claim a space in the world as yours.

This is the house Riley moved into – where she became a Keigley.

And it’s the home London Eli Scout slept in after the hospital.

The home Mosely was carried into at three months old in that dirty Bambi shirt.

The tiny, happy yellow bedroom those girls shared with Shel Silverstein art and poetry adorning the walls.

Bergen was swaddled and carried across the living room floor straight from the hospital, sporting his itsy tie-dyed onesie to match his three adoring, waiting sisters in coordinating tie-dye.

It’s the house that was so crowded that Piper Finn joined us in her crib placed at the foot of our bed.

There’ve been changes –

new windows missing the ladybugs trapped between the panes.

Crabapple tree vanished and a few solar-powered footlights glowing by the sidewalk.

Siding replaced and a front deck with railing that actually meets current building codes.

But there’s the same still too.

The bright red farmhouse sink installed by our friend Dana –

the bath tub for tiny Keigley babies, one after the other.

It feels like echoes of us somehow.

The beautiful mosaic backsplash with our initials hidden in the art that broke my heart to leave hanging there.

Leftover hutch that never made the move.

On the closet doors in our former bedroom the mismatching knobs make me smile.

One blue star and one brown manufactured knob.

I never could get the brown one off to replace it to match.

The ceiling above our bed still bearing the mark of the location where thousands of honey bees had settled into the attic and worked their way through the plaster.

It’s so very bittersweet.

Why does life always pile up this way?

I don’t want to live thirty minutes from a town that only boasts a Wal-Mart.

In twenty-ish years of living in that town, I’d never attended a church that felt like a challenge and a comfort at the same time.

And yet.

And yet.

There is something.

Something so magnetic

and charming.

(Beyond the driveway.)

Walking outside,

barefoot on grass wet from an evening rain shower,

I stand still in the dark.

It’s a darkness I’d forgotten.

A darkness we no longer experience.

No residual city lights.  No high powered dusk to dawn lamp glowing.

I listen.

And it’s quiet.

Beautifully silent.

No sirens.

No cars whizzing by.

Not a fire alarm nor an ambulance’s wail.

And I love it.

I desperately want it.

For me.

For my children.

For the story of their lives.

The backdrop of their growing up.

Why can’t we have both?

To live in Virginia is impractical.

I don’t even think I really want to.

I adore our homeschool co-op.

My children have kind friends and that’s not a gift to be tossed aside.

I have incredible friends as I’ve seldom known in my adult life.

Church is convicting and encouraging.

We drive in either direction and have two thriving, eclectic cities at our disposal.

If I could put all of that in Virginia, that’d be good.

If I could put the farm in South Carolina, that’d be good.

But, of course, I can’t do either.

And so I practice what my life has come to know so well – the art of balance. 

The visits and the drives and the grateful for the Both and the All and the Was and the Is.