On settling down, in, for...

I should long ago have lost count of the number of moves Karen and I have made in our 28 years of marriage, but that number, 19, is as sticky in memory as gum in July to sneakers, easily making up in magnitude whatever it may lack in any evenness or roundness.

Sure, not all of those moves were of the long-distance kind, although enough of them covered enough ground, so that if movers in those days had given out frequent-packer points, we could long ago have cashed in. Even so, even the short moves, with the shortest of all only across a driveway in Vermont, were never easy. There was still the pitching of stuff accumulated since the last move and the packing of stuff that would seed the next move, still the lifting down stairs and the lugging up, still the last-minute cleaning; and then, once on the far end of the move, came the unpacking, the trial-and-error of the couch here or there or maybe there, the frantic, frustrating search for the bed hardware or the clock or your favorite cookbook, which, you knew, you absolutely knew, you put in a box somewhere; and then, slowly, imperceptibly, over some measure of months, the ineluctable settling in.

Karen and I have now settled in 19 times.

We have, however, settled down maybe once, that in the trim and heartbreakingly beautiful village of Peacham, Vermont.

There, over the span of a decade, interrupted only by a stint at Notre Dame, we raised our then-young children. There, in fact, in a robin’s-egg blue bedroom on the second floor of a quintessential white-clapboarded, green-shuttered, 150-year-old house on the main street — “the prettiest house,” I once told Karen, “we may ever live in” — our youngest son was born, deep in a knee-deep, mid-April snowstorm in 1992, his home birth at once the occasion for two weeks of meals provided by friends and neighbors and, briefly, a cause for village concern, as Karen and I dithered for a week over a name for the lad, teetering between eventual winner, Dónal, and also-ran Fintan (“That boy got a name yet?” came the inevitable, but good-natured question I fielded from all quarters, as I picked up the mail at the post office across the street and across the farther green). And there, too, in the steeply-gabled back room on the third floor, with VPR blaring from the radio on the windowsill and sheep bleating from the fields beyond our back fence, I wrote in architecturally lofty solitude for what was then my family’s living.

It was also in Peacham that our lives became inextricably stitched into the community quilt, that quilt blanketing at its center the old cemetery on the hill below the Bond house, where the graves speak of lives lived and lost in the 1700s; one edge then drifting up and over the Civil War monument steepling Church Hill; the whole thing a patchwork of field and forest, of farms in families for generations, its fabric stretching south from Harvey’s Hollow and the covered Greenbank Hollow bridge, up and over the brow of Cow Hill, its flanks forested and pocked with the cellar holes of homes that once were and are no more, your imagination free there to conjure up the long-ago scraping of plows, the lowing of cows, laughter in fallen kitchens, love in vanished bedrooms and lofts; down and up again to the village itself, over the mast of the Congregational Church, rumpling west to Macks Mountain and dipping eastward toward Harvey’s Lake, then spreading south to where the snow drifts perennially in winter across the road fronting Elizabeth’s Farm.

So, you ask, if so lovely, how could we ever leave?

Medical school, in short, the longer answer a topic for another day.

But for all our practice in settling in, and our single successful attempt at settling down, what Karen and I have never done, and what is so often misunderstood about us, is that we have steadfastly refused to settle for less.

It was desire that led us 25 years ago to cross the Atlantic to Ireland, and it was family that brought us back. Friendship pulled us to Massachusetts, and longing took us again to Virginia. Vermont happened, as I’ve often told the tale, because Virginia’s unrelenting heat and humidity at last drove me far enough north until, finally, only an hour from the Canadian border, I cooled off. Notre Dame took us west to Indiana, home took us back to Vermont, and medical school to Iowa. And always, always, to this day always, there remains the tug of adventure: e-mails that trumpet opportunities for doctors in New Zealand, Australia, British Columbia; others that tout jobs in Montana, Idaho or, dare I write the words, back home in Vermont; or that inner call, the one that says, life’s short, there’s so much yet to do, so little time in which to do it, sell the house, chuck the stuff, get up, get going, c’mon, man, you’re 57 and time, time, time…

Yet here we still are, still in Iowa, four years after medical school, one year after residency.

So, have we settled?

In, yes. Down, no. For less, absolutely not.

Karen and I are, I admit, and in keeping with the title of this blog, in the simmer dim, neither here nor there, but somewhere in between. Where we’ll be a year from now, I cannot now predict, but home, for me, remains the one place in which we once settled. Can you go home again? No, no, wrote Thomas Wolfe, so emphatically he put it in the book’s title. As for me, we’ll see.

© 2008 by Dónal Kevin Gordon