Ponder Anew

It's been almost three weeks since I've posted. In those three weeks, I have been engaged in packing up a 1600-square-foot house; laying out $2,300 to begin an apartment rental; renting a U-Haul (because that tapped out our savings); putting as much as we could fit onto the U-Haul; driving 260 miles northeast; unpacking the U-Haul; and, oh yeah, starting a new job.

Since COVID ate my job of seven years, I was fortunate to find a new one in my field. And I do mean fortunate. I came within a whisker of being hired to work in a supermarket deli, which is supremely physical work and hard on the feet. 

There is more to the U-Haul saga. The hubs brought another load up this past weekend, and we offloaded some of it into the apartment and some of it into a storage locker. Firstborn and I now have to repack the storage locker to make room for a loveseat and secretary. Seriously! In my next life, I want to be preliterate.

For the best part of thirty years, I have lived in the Piedmont, the foothills of North Carolina. I enjoy the changing show of the trees with the seasons, but other than that, I guess I've become immured to their charms. Changing regions has been an eye-opener.

I am now in the Tidewater region of Virginia, in the southeast part, which includes Norfolk, Hampton, Newport News (hello!), Chesapeake, Suffolk, Virginia Beach, and Portsmouth. This is a part of Virginia that consists mostly of water with a few fingers of land laid over it. The trick is to identify the body of water. This part of Virginia has so much water, I almost always flunk. "That's got to be the bay, right?" I asked a colleague as we crossed a large body of water. "Oh, no, that's the James River," she said casually. Bodies of water I think are the ocean are the bay; what I consider the bay is a river; and if I see a body of water small enough to be a river, it's invariably a creek. I have concluded that this part of Virginia has so much water that residents are casual about it.

The upside, besides all this great natural beauty and being half an hour from the beach, is that so much water begets many, many bridges. I love bridges. I think they're cool and am always glad to go over one. I credit this to a childhood in suburban Fort Lauderdale and Miami, where there was a great deal of travel back and forth over two long causeways. One was a drawbridge, which sometimes was up. Whee! I still miss the Sunshine Skyway Bridge on the west coast of Florida.

The other day, a slight wrong turn led me onto the James River Bridge. The only recourse was to cross it, make a U-turn, and cross back. Which I did. Later in the week, I found myself near the bridge again, so of course I went down and rode it across and back just for the fun of it. Because, of course I did. The bridge is five miles long and takes five and a half minutes to cross. You see why I thought the river was the Chesapeake Bay? The thing had waves!

Even as I am delighting in my landscape, I am pleased to be back to my roots. Not just my own, growing up in a coastal city, but my ancestors, who came from the Tidewater region. I am tempted to re-read William Styron's A Tidewater Morning. 

Too much new stuff can be overwhelming. But if I take my new life in pieces, I expect to find lots of enjoyment in living in a new part of the country.