Mendolonium

People with kids often wonder what the talked about before they had children – so focused are their conversations on their precious little bundles of joy.  In our house, I wonder what we talked about before Jeff began applying for jobs and we began preparing to move.  As Jeff has garnered interviews across the country over the past month I have been stalking zillow.com and realtor.com for the perfect 3+ bedroom, pre-1930, in a good school district, under $500k house in Illinois, New York, Michigan, and now the Bay Area.  We have a “sell the house punchlist” with a daunting list of things to fix before we put the house on the market; you know, little things like baseboards in the kitchen*.  but maybe it just doesn’t exist.  As I consider a career change into politics I plot the distances from our new potential hometowns to the state capital.  I still fantasize about med school as well and also look for how many medical schools are within a one hour driving radius.  Overwhelmed with it all, concerned by the salaries being offered for a tenure-track professorship, and wondering what the hell I am going to do in a new town with no job, no friends, and two little children we have had something of a radical thought:

What if we just stay?

It has become abundantly clear from my investigations of new locales that the grass is not always greener on the other side.  In the case of the Bay Area it seems doubtful we could afford a house with enough land to grow any grass.  Our life in Pasadena is pretty damned good.  We have an affordable, beautiful, albeit (see above) incomplete home.  Our garden is a joy and I think that if we leave I might miss my bed of leeks as much as I would miss a friend.   Speaking of which, we have great friends and neighbors.  Our neighborhood is fantastic:  we can walk to multiple parks, the library, the post office, the drugstore, an Italian market, good restaurants, and the train.  And let us not forget that by staying here we would mean not moving:  not packing up boxes, not “showing” the house, not starting over with garden, friends, and schools.  As someone who moved roughly a dozen times, the idea of NOT MOVING is immensely appealing.

Jeff is still applying for jobs; his life’s ambition is to teach and he will make a fabulous professor, however we are going to be much more selective about where he applies.  And I am going to try to live in the present and to immerse myself in Pasadena.  I am going to re-engage myself in local politics;  I am rather horrified at the direction that our country has taken and I am coming to believe that we need to effect change from the bottom (local level) up.  I am going to work in my garden without thinking, “Will I be here to see these plants mature and bear fruit? ” In something of a leap of faith I ordered 18 seedlings** today.  I hope that no matter what happens I will be here long enough to can those tomatoes.

*  We have lived here SEVEN (and a half years) without baseboards in the kitchen.  Classy.

* Mint, thyme, tomatoes***, peppers, and eggplant.

** This year, I started tomatoes and peppers from seed for the first time, but they are so very tiny that my natural impatience and skepticism (Really these wee little things with four leaves are going to produce hundreds of pounds of tomatoes?) that I caved tonight and ordered a few seedlings.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 4th, 2010 at 11:59 pm and is filed under The Family Mendolo. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.