Since I really don't like it where I am living now, there is no life for me here, I sat down and gave it a hard think. While I have some family in the area, I have no friends here, no job, and no activities that interest me. The local "culture" doesn't register as a culture at all, in my opinion, probably because the local "culture" is money, and that's something I don't have a whole lot of, particularly since I no longer have a job of any sort. Here, people have connection only as long as they have kids in the schools, and I have none. There's only the people I say hello to when I walk my dog, and those wouldn't give me the time of day if I didn't say something first, and if I wasn't walking past their houses with my dog, they wouldn't know I exist.
And some of the people I pass on the street are actively hostile. I recently had a woman accuse my dog of biting her - he didn't even touch her - and try to follow me home, to find out where I live. She's still stalking the neighborhood, trying to figure it out. She made a huge fuss on Nextdoor about it. Even put up a picture of her "bite," which looks more like a self-inflicted fingernail scratch, or maybe a mosquito bite that she'd been scratching at. The cops, who I called because she was chasing me, said there was no bite. The animal control officer said I have a nice dog, and there's no problem. But still, this woman is stalking the neighborhood, looking for me.
Do I feel safe here? No. And it's not just this one woman. There are more weird things that have gone on, which make me feel very uncomfortable.
So where can I go?
I looked on Zillow at the place where I grew up. Wow, it looks nothing at all like it did when I was a kid. It used to have street trees in front of every house. There's only one tree left on the whole block.
This used to be an empty lot, with a very large mulberry tree in the middle of it. It was a slight hill, and we used to ride our sleds on it. Even the hill seems to be gone.
This was our house:
Doesn't look anything at all like it did. Granted, that is probably a good thing, looks like the people who own it now are taking good care of it. The window with the a/c in it was my half of a bedroom during high school. It had just enough space for a twin sized bed and a tiny desk. That was the whole room.
I remember we had to measure how wide a car was before we could consider buying it, to make sure it would fit up the driveway. It's skinny as it is, but then it has two drainpipes with concrete bases directly across from each other, so if you weren't really good at backing up straight, you'd get holes in the sides of your car.
My grandmother and uncle lived downstairs, and we were upstairs. Most of the back yard was garden, and we had a mulberry tree, too. I doubt those are there anymore. I know, trees die, and lately, it seems nobody bothers to replace them.
So no, I'm not going "back home." I've been away too long, and it's moved on without me.
I've also thought about other places I've lived, and really, none of them are worth going back to. So I'm kind of feeling adrift. It's not a nice feeling.
