Now that I’m done with school I want to go home

I don’t know why I bother even thinking about living anywhere other than the Pacific Northwest. I think I spend so much time achingly homesick that it effects the rest of my life. 

Now that I’m done with school I want to go home.

The one thing I seem to be a wuss about is my deep affection, nay love for my homelands. 

I feel like, a salmon hatched in Seattle who went out to sea to mature, and now it's time to return to my home river. 

I went away to school because what I wanted to learn wasn't being taught at home, I feel like it's my duty to return home with my new stuff. 

I have a sense of responsibility to the community that raised me, the community I helped to build, the people and places of the Northwest are part of me. 

I think about living other places, I've tried living other places, I usually want to live someplace warmer but I always go home. I love home. I've always longed for a sense of ancestry, a sense of being locked to a place. I knew my family came west but I didn't really understand the story. In the time I've been in school I learned that my (dads) family is an original Oregon Trail family. My g-g-g-grandpa came from Ireland, kind of hated America as it was at the time, moved westerly a couple of times, participated in the Underground Railroad and finally left the US to the Oregon Country in 1845 (part of their party are the famed Meeks Cut Off folks), before the Civil War because he wasn't jiving with slavery. My family moved because they were abolitionists. Some folks settled in the Willamette Valley OR while others backtracked to what is now Eastern Washington. My (paternal) grandmother is from Nez Perce ID. My mom is from Montana, although her family moved west from the Mid West in her infancy, my (maternal-m) g-grandpa shipped from Liverpool, (maternal-p) g-grand cam from Scotland. The places they came from isn't as important is the final landing spots and the spirited drive to get there, that is what I'm drawn to. 

All of that is to say I belong in the PNW. The sense of ancestry and place I've longed for is there; "there" is a big triangle with Seattle at one point, Helena Montana at another, and Eugene Oregon as the last point.  

I love quite a few other places, the Bay Area, Southern California and Southwest, and I'd love to give these places a try, but for now, I'm aching to go home.

Now to get my husband on board.