Where?

I was born in the beautiful city of San Francisco, so by default I'm a California girl.  What's strange is that I never felt like I belonged in California.  Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful place to live and I grew up in a very nice area; I just didn't fit in well with the people there.  I was very lucky to grow up around my family, my mom comes from six kids and needless to say I have lots of cousins.  My parents still live in the same house that they moved into in 1975, which seems to be rare these days.  I finished high school and went on to a community college, where I met a wonderful man, who would turn out to be even a more wonderful husband.  We moved around a bit, but still within an hour of my parents, until April of 2007.  His employer offered us an opportunity to get out of California and head for the Midwest.  There was no hesitation and we were off to Indiana. 


We have two children, a boy and a girl, and we knew this was a door opening for them to have a much better education and a safe place to grow up. I was also hoping that they would develop a social life.  Where we lived was like living in a compound, I never felt safe to let the kids anywhere but the yard or out front with supervision.  Most of their classmates’ parents worked and as a result of that were “latch key kids”.  It made it difficult to have friends over to play.  It was very sad.


One of the first things I noticed about the neighborhood where we were going to live is that hardly anyone had a fence.  You could walk through everyone’s yard, how bizarre.  Within a couple of hours of arriving in Indiana to our rental home, we met a neighbor with two children in the same grade as ours and two younger children.  You could tell she was meant to be a mom.  God makes these wonderful nurturing women who just ooze kindness, patience, and love.  I don’t feel I’m one of them.  Don’t get me wrong, I love being a mom and would not trade it for anything, but I am not one of those moms. 


 Something that I noticed right away is that there are many different "critters" in these parts.  We have a resident chipmunk that loves to climb the pole and get into the birdseed, regardless of the obstacles we put in its way.  We have rabbits that leave their prints in the snow, so adorable.  In fact one baby rabbit fell into the basement well window and my daughter had to pick it up and let him back into the yard.  I’ve seen all kinds of birds from big, plump robins, cardinals, and hawks.  We also have these disgusting bugs called Cicadas; they give me the heebee geebees.  During the summer it sounds like a horror movie with those bugs.  Oh, we are lucky to have fireflies out here too. 


I’ve really enjoyed the change of scenery here and I especially like that we have four seasons.  The biggest change didn’t come from the meeting the people here, or the critters, or the seasons; something changed my heart forever…