Returning

I've moved many times in my adult life, but those moves have doubled back on themselves so that I often feel as if I'm in some kind of reincarnation cycle, that I'm being sent back to a place I've been before in order to work something out or rectify some grievance or succeed in some task I've failed before. But the cycle is just shy of the mark in a couple of ways, perhaps the most important way being that my returns have yet to result in any clarification or illumination. I've returned to Texas twice in my adult life, after living in other states of the union, but not exactly to the same locale. In 1983, my husband and I left our birth state of Texas to live in Louisiana for four years; then we returned to Texas, to Bryan/College Station, where we lived and worked for six years. Then we left for Minnesota, where we lived for 2 1/2 years before heading to Columbus, Georgia (and a town nearby) for a seven-year stint before returning to Texas once again, to Belton, a small town an hour's drive north of Austin. Staying there for 3 1/2 years, we were lured back to Georgia by expectations that ultimately didn't materialize, and here we've been--except now my husband has taken a job in Louisiana, just north of New Orleans. Shall I follow? Will we have lived twice in every state in which we've made a home in our adult lives? I don't know yet. I really like the town where I'm living now, and my husband is hesitant to cut the cord, too. We remain in a kind of limbo before our next geographical reincarnation.

But the one state to which we have yet to return to live--though we have vacationed there several times--is Minnesota. When will I return to live there, I wonder, as I sequester myself from the heat wave that is washing across Georgia. Today, the temperature in Ely, Minnesota, rose to 73 degrees Fahrenheit. Here where I am in Georgia, the temperature hit the mid-nineties and is predicted to hover near 100 degrees tomorrow. Perhaps because I haven't returned to live in Minnesota as I have in Texas, Georgia, and (perhaps) Louisiana, Minnesota still has the lure of a young love never consummated. It remains in memory not just as a "what was" but as a "what could have been," a "could have been" more poignant because of the opportunities that were opening up to me there just as I was packing to leave.

If the history of my doubling back stops in south Louisiana, perhaps the northwoods of Minnesota will be there for me just past my last breath. Perhaps I will be reincarnated in some other form, as Heart-flower (Pale Pink Corydalis), clinging tenaciously on a rocky outcrop above the Kawishiwi River; or maybe as a loon (more likely) calling wildly on Lark Lake. Or maybe I'll just be content with this last request: scatter my ashes on some quiet lake in northern Minnesota, my last return, my final resting place.