Leaving San Diego (Reprise)

I wrote this in the summer of 2006 for our neighborhood newsletter. It was first posted for Ricochet on August 27, 2015, for the group writing theme of "Cities."

Early on the Sunday morning of July 30, our two girls and I will be climbing into an overloaded Subaru with a pair of disgruntled cats. We’ll be making the long drive to Northwest Montana to join my husband, Jeff. You’ve probably noticed, like I have, that we are definitely not the only family moving away. One friend of mine has already moved to Texas, and another is going to Oklahoma at the beginning of August. People in our neighborhood are already gone. The reasons why are straightforward: San Diego is getting popular and crowded, and in other states you can buy a dream house for the price of a fixer-upper out here.

But San Diego is still beautiful, with luxurious weather, and if you managed to buy a house a few years ago, it turns out you made a deft financial move. So why do some families go and others stay? Here’s our story.

Neither Jeff nor I is from this area. My family moved here from the East Coast in the late ’80s; Jeff was stationed here in the military. So after Jeff and I met, we stayed in San Diego because it was the most natural thing to do—we were already settled here, surrounded by my family. But from the first days that I knew him, Jeff pined for the places where he grew up—not so much for Colorado, where he had lived most of his life, but for Kansas, where he had worked on farms for his relatives as a teenager. His restless personality thrived on the constant demands of farm work. It was what he knew well and loved.

So as San Diego absorbed more newcomers, traffic worsened and made Jeff’s job as a traveling technician more and more difficult. Upheavals and politics at work made daily life stressful. Jeff started talking about finding a place to live in the country somewhere, and as I learned years ago, Jeff is not just a talker. He follows through. He wanted the little girls to experience the idyllic lifestyle he enjoyed when he visited Kansas. And he wanted to work at his own pace, as his own boss one day. He talked to me many nights about it, while he sat in his hot tub looking up at the sky. And I agreed that we should try out a new location, if only for his sanity.

The northwestern corner of Montana ended up being our destination because Jeff felt that his family home in Kansas would have too little stimulation for a city person like me. We had hiked in the wilderness of Glacier National Park one summer and loved it; the second summer, we bought twenty acres of country near Glacier. The third summer, on our way home from Glacier, we visited our property off a dirt road. It was reality now: this quiet place where white daisies, deer, and pine trees thrived would be our new home.

Jeff has now been out there working at his new job, impatient for us to join him. He’s on the property overseeing the building of the house, which will have an unfinished basement and upstairs in addition to the main floor. I’ve picked out flooring and cabinets, and I’m sure the whole thing will be more beautiful and spacious than anything I ever expected to own. A town eleven miles away is booming, so there’s work and places to buy what we want. Glacier is close, as is a ski area called Whitefish. The area is crammed with lakes and forests to explore. People are friendly as long as you don’t tell them that you’ve just settled there from California. Life is less frenetic than it is here.

But we won’t sell our house here just yet. We’ll see how quickly we can get used to months of freezing temperatures and dark skies. Besides, it might be a good idea to keep the San Diego house for a while, even if we never come back here.

I think I’ll be fine once the ordeal of the move is over, and I’m gradually becoming Angie from Montana. There will be plenty to miss, though, while I’m teaching my daughters to fish or bundling up to play in the snow or stowing my things in roomy cupboards. This San Diego house has been good to me for ten years: the old doorknobs, the keyholes meant for skeleton keys, the archway between the kitchen and dining room, and the worn wood floors are just a few of the things I’ll miss. Jeff did so much work on the outside—he added a front deck and a deck at the top of the yard where you can see several displays of Fourth of July fireworks at once. Will the renters weed whack our half acre and see to it that our stands of bamboo and our honeysuckle, jasmine, and ivy vines don’t wither away?

I’ll talk to my family by phone now, instead of in person three times a week; Christmas presents for them will have to be petite so we can send them in the mail. I’ll miss having such a faithful, kind walking partner and neighbors I know and like. This morning I made a casserole to take for my last “meal Sunday” with our small church—just a couple more Sundays to go with them. And when you’ve lived somewhere for nearly twenty years, as I have, you have a solid network of friends and connections. There’s always e-mail, I guess.

While I’m hiking through meadows under blue skies, drinking in the wildflowers and spotting animals, I won’t forget the Coronado Bridge curving over a blue bay dotted with sailboats. Or Coronado Beach with all its white sand, or that expectant feeling of being at the Zoo or Sea World when the sun has gone down. And there’s something to be said for pulling out onto Harbor Drive after your plane has touched down in San Diego. Balboa Park, the Star of India, Coronado Hotel, Downtown, “J” Street Marina, La Jolla, our dry and dusty mountains, our Thai restaurants—I’ll miss all these.

But as someone once said, I won’t think about that today—I’ll think about that tomorrow. For now, I’ll cram in as much as I can, even with the upheaval of packing. My mom and I took the girls to the beach on Saturday. I’m going to eat dinner with old friends as much as possible. And whenever I’m outdoors on these long San Diego summer evenings, I’ll breathe in the moist ocean breeze and live it up.