Belonging. It's an interesting word, yes? What does it mean to you? To me it means feeling at home, as if everything is right and in its right place. A good fit. I can't sleep tonight so I am here in front of the computer. Rick, both dogs and the cat are sound asleep in the bedroom above me. 

When we first arrived here in New Jersey I felt as if I was coming home again. After all, I had been born and lived the first twelve years of my life only two hours from where we live today. I felt as if the very soil beneath my feet was part of me and not that dry dusty soil of Colorado that I had called home for nearly thirty years.

My mom was living only three hours away from us too at this point. We loved our house, Rick loved his job. We embraced the newness of it all just like we had embraced the newness of Germany, then the Netherlands, and France. 

The thing is, that after a few years in those foreign countries, as much as we loved the experience of it all we were always ready to come home after several years. As much as we loved them; they were not home. We didn't belong.

When Rick first took this job in New Jersey it was supposed to be for five years, until the company was sold. They ended up selling the company much sooner than expected (after only not quite three years after we moved here) and the company went from being a wonderful family-run atmosphere to a very corporate one. Just like Hewlettt Packard from which we had been jettisoned and the reason we moved in the first place. Since then the job has become more of what the acquiring company wants them to do than what the original founders had wanted. 

I too loved it and all the differences to Colorado. I enjoyed the gray days instead of sunshine all the time. (Silly me!) The moist humid air. (Ha!) All the trees and the need to not have a watering system in place to water the grass. Mother Nature took care of that most years. 

The pool. Ah ... the pool. A revelation indeed. We didn't want one, yet we found it gave us great pleasure. I will miss it.

But somewhere in the past two years (of which the death of Alex was pivotal) things changed. We had an epiphany at the cabin that changed our view for ever after. Just what where we doing here in New Jersey? We have no ties here. It's very hard to move somewhere where people have relationships with other couples going back to when their children went to school together. They have never lived anywhere else. Rick and I do not have those deep-rooted relationships connected with living in one place for as long as we've lived; nor do we have the child aspect of things. We have always been people who have experienced living in many different places and cultures instead of just one place. It is a different lifestyle. Not better or worse; just different. We don't belong here.

That dry sunny dusty rain-starved place called Colorado has my soul more than the East where I had been born. After all, I had only lived 12 years in New York before we moved to Florida (which I consider the South, not the East). Colorado shaped and formed me as an adult and it left its mark. As did the 70 acres of land and a 1,000 square foot cabin in the high prairie of Northern Colorado. It's where we both feel at peace. Like we were meant to be there. Living off-grid in our small battery-and wind-powered cabin. Where the deer, moose, elk and antelope play and the roads are not plowed in winter. Where the wind blows nearly all the time. Where the coyotes sing to the moon. Where the Milky Way shines in the night sky. Where the sound of silence is deafening.

Where we really and truly belong.