One Year Later

Today marks one year. I pulled up to my new place in my car (his name is Keith, he’s still here) with my mom, two very unhappy cats, and a suitcase full of belongings. Everything else would come five weeks later, but I was here: in Egg Harbor, to a condo I bought from thousands of miles away. Luckily I bought it furnished . . . it was a long five weeks until the moving truck showed up. There was a good bit of panic as we wondered if it ever would.

It was a nice evening to arrive. And there’s nothing like Door County air. You feel the difference when you leave and come back. We had pizza that night, I think. A beer definitely. My dad had everything he could prepare, prepared. The cats hid under the bed.

My mom teared up when she remembered me telling her, a decade prior, that I would come back someday. And here I was. Not back to my hometown, but back home.

I haven’t regretted it, not for a single moment this past year. Besides being a safer place to ride out the pandemic, Door County always felt like the endgame for me. I didn’t know I could have this, a home here, so soon in my life. Someone asked me recently how long I thought I’d live here — a new coworker, I’d never been asked that before — and I answered, confused: forever? Yeah, forever.

My mom and I were talking about this recently. I am not perfectly happy every day. I battle work anxieties and depressive tendencies and sometimes there are just bad days. That’s true wherever I have lived. But what hasn’t been true everywhere I lived in this: the lake, the woods, that breathable beautiful air right out my door, constant. No matter what life brings, there’s the bay. The sun sinks into it every night. I can watch it, when I remember to be grateful.

In a year here I have run and biked and hiked and ate and explored and done so little on the list of things I could do. There’s time. I have spent days in bed or watching TV or, recently, days at the Writing Center. I have spent evenings having dinner with my parents and naming constellations from the hot tub. I have spent evenings emptying a bottle of wine. I have spent evenings making fires and feeding the warmth for hours.

Tonight, I rearranged my bookshelves in my bedroom. I took down the multiple sets of Harry Potter books that sat like a pedestal on the shelf above my headboard. I dusted it off and just left one set. I plucked my other favorite books from the main bookshelf and created a different kind of shrine on the headboard. A small marker of change.

I am not so different from who I was a year ago — the Natalie who lived in Austin and had spent the last decade in cities. But I am also more myself here. More honest, I think. I am hugged and I hug more often.

In part, I moved here because I couldn’t see a future in Austin anymore no matter how much I loved the city itself (the greenbelt, the food, my very good job). I’m not exactly sure what my future in Door County will be, but I see one. Many. Options, possibilities. A whole life that comes with the good stuff and the tough days and the laughter and the mistakes . . . and no matter what, go outside, there’s the water.

With Love,

Natalie