I ran away from home.

The last few months have, by far, been some of the most surreal of my life.  I am sure I am not the only one who ever transferred her job and had to live in hotel while house-hunting for a place for her husband and father ... who were about 2,500 miles away.  I simply cannot be the only one with that story but there have been many, many days in last two months when it felt like it.

     

Ever since I moved back to Ohio in 2003, I have been trying to claw my way back to the Bay Area.  I love Cleveland but, for me, it had become like a difficult childhood friend.  We never quite got along again after I got back from San Francisco.  I don't want to be a city snob ... there are great things about every place and good people everywhere ... but I just needed a something other than Cleveland.  It was personal.  In the six years I was back, I re-met John Piche' (that's a story for another time) and I knew he was it.  I almost immediately began to sell him on the idea of the West coast.  It was sometime around New Year's Eve 2008-2009 that the stars really aligned and I could see how it could be done.  I think that I cursed us a little when I said to John, "If we're going to do this, it is just going to be a complicated year."  Why did I have to say it would be a year?
     

It seemed almost impossible to explain to anyone in my life why we were doing what we were doing.  John and I had a cute house in Cleveland Heights.  We both had good (for Cleveland) paying jobs.  Why would we (or as most people saw it, I) throw everything into chaos?  We aren't kids after all.  By most people's estimation we were finally in a place that most people work through their 20s and early 30s to get to ... nothing left but to have babies, right?  I was grateful to my friend, Val, when she bottom-lined if for me saying, "Look, what you guys are doing is crazy.  It's just nuts."  It's what everyone was thinking but she said it unapologetically ... and without whining.
       

When my plane touched down at SFO on June 27th, I felt every ounce of that craziness and everyone else seemed right.  It was hard to walk calmly out of that airport and into a Super Shuttle with my head held high and not like someone in a blind panic on a crazy mission.  It was hard to wake up every day in a residence hotel room fit for a meth addict on her way to the bottom; rally my spirits and look at house after disastrous foreclosed house.  I have always sort of liked being an anonymous character but never before had I blended into the scenery of a place when a whole real life existed for me somewhere else ... and I just wasn't there.  It was like running away from home.

I miss my dog.