date certain

the other day we sat down and planned our immediate future. we both decided that a direct flight trumped connections from smaller airports, even if those smaller airports were in locations that various family called home. a direct flight to copenhagen means o'hare. o'hare is fine. one of my fondest memories of o'hare is my mom speeding down the expressway and dropping my little sister and i at the door, as it were, so that we could catch a plane to my dad's house for the summer. she ended up catching up with us at the gate, back when you could go to the gate without a ticket, and i remember feeling very touched by the fact that she'd parked and come in, not knowing if we'd still be there or not. i guess now i know that's what a parent does.

well, so, o'hare. i had envisioned that picking out a date to leave would be a really exciting moment. when we sat down and looked at our calendar though, it felt a little more heavy than exciting. we were really going to put an end to all of this wisconsin stuff, huh? we'd come here eight and half years ago not knowing anything about madison or much about wisconsin, except that kids from the northwest suburbs traveled up here for lake geneva. (except i never did.) we didn't know what our future in wisconsin would be, except that we'd both attend school here. i guess i've always felt like wisconsin was not a permanent location. the problem is that i love it so much, so even though i know it has to end, i don't really want it to. (except for the fact that we're moving to denmark and who can complain about that? not me.)

it's a first love kind of thing. i need to see what other cities have to offer. i have a lot more growing to do. i can't stay with wisconsin all my life. maybe someday i'll come back to stay, but i just can't live here contentedly knowing i won't ever leave. i want to. but i can't. maybe if i were a more practical person. maybe if my entire family lived here or even in one place, but they don't. they never have lived in one place and with little exception, they've never stayed in one place. i don't have the parents that have been married for 40 years and lived in the same town and the same house for just as long. i think of my parents as each having very distinct chapters in their lives, some longer than others, with the other person taking up just a small space in a larger life. and while i want and expect greg to be there for the rest of my life, to think that the rest of the story will take place in a single, known location seems a bit too claustrophobic. downright scary. lives don't proceed in such a linear fashion, right? except that i know that location cannot be the single variable that makes a life linear. i'm confident that no one leads a linear life, or if they do, they do so without knowing beforehand, because there is just no formula for making a life linear. so there.

nonetheless, the next month of my life feels fairly mapped out. we picked february 16th, so we must get everything from our to-do list done by that date. that's what we'll be doing. how we'll be feeling will necessarily become more dynamic than the last two months of almost pure excitement and overwhelm with all there is to do to make this move happen. now we have to get down to the nitty gritty, those messy details of saying goodbye to our pets, seeing this or that person or location "for the last time," locking the door and driving away from our house and our wonderful neighborhood... ugh. messy details. they're good to go through, even if they make you lose all composure. which they will, for me.