Road Not Taken

As the House of 3M was about to be no more, what with Brunette, Mrs. L, and I having all gone on to different phases in our lives, I was going through all of my stuff, getting rid of things that I still hadn’t gotten rid of. I was going through some old desk drawers that I would mostly just throw things in and sorting through stacks of papers. Among them I found reams of old e-mails from friends chronicling our college years, which I sadly recycled after skimming them. I find that I’m happier now, although I wouldn’t trade anything in my past, so I don’t really have a need to read about old boyfriends that preceded husbands, fights with people none of us remember anymore, crushes, little victories, big victories, and all of those things that made up our journey to adulthood. But there was something I found that kind of stopped me in my tracks, because I had completely forgotten about it. An old Peace Corps application.

Near the end of college, when I knew that my life had to change because I was a person I wasn’t crazy about stuck in a rut I knew I needed to get out of, I was thinking about all kinds of things that I would have liked to do. My first attempt at finding a grad school program fell through, I had no job lined up, but I knew that I was unhappy and something had to be different soon or it would never be different. Having grown up traveling, and having had a call to service in one form or another most of my life, I think the Peace Corps felt like a really natural step for me. But for some reason, I never even filled out my application. I don’t know why – but there it was, staring me in the face nine years later. Not a pen mark anywhere, no dog-earing on the pages, nothing. Maybe I was too scared to go, maybe I was feeling like my application would be rejected as many others had been recently, or maybe I just changed my mind. But having spoken to Special K about doing something like the Peace Corps post-retirement in many, many years (he’s not really on board with that one) I find it interesting that it’s a life I had considered and completely forgotten about.

I can’t begin to imagine what my life would be like now had I taken that leap; I don’t regret the path I took, because I like the life I have. So a different path would have led to a different place – possibly one without Special K and all the wonderful friends I have now. (Milo and Xena definitely would have had to make other plans.) I mean, maybe I would have come to be the me I am now regardless, with different experiences working in the same way, and maybe I would have still met Special K, since I can’t imagine someone else being as well suited to me as he is, and maybe I would have still ended up back here, since this feels more like home than any other place. But maybe not.

So that was my little moment of existential pondering this weekend. We have all moved out, the walls painted white, the carpets shampooed, the tile floors scrubbed (well, kind of – did my best). And now that I don’t live where I lived, which I haven’t for a while anyway, life is moving on. I had a little goodbye moment at the old place, thinking of everything that happened there over the past five years, but then I turned out the lights, locked the door, and dropped the key off. As we pulled up to our little house in Silver Spring, Special K said “welcome home, Honey.”

Indeed.