Why We Still Live in Wilmington

Yes, Wilmington is pretty, with a lovely little downtown with its brick buildings, with its river and its horse-drawn-carriage tours, with its cafes and restaurants and kitschy shops. Yes, the beach, the ocean and the sand and grilling out in the summer and the mild winters that give the illusion of seasons without actually snowing or giving you frostbite or making driving difficult. Yes, the university, the sense of movement, the annual graduations, the feeling that life is endlessly open and unbearably promising. Yes, the impressive concentration of health food stores for such a small town, the local dairies and the multiple farmers markets, the grocery stores that sell local and organic produce, the U-Pick farms and the blueberry festival. The azaleas in April that look like explosions. Sweet tea and Southern accents and vinegar-based barbecue.

None of those have anything to do with why we are still in Wilmington.

The original plan: Move “north,” go to grad school, finish in three years, move somewhere else.

We never were going to move back to Florida. Leaving there was leaving, for us. For good. But Wilmington never was the place we dreamed of. I started looking at houses in Seattle, in Portland, apartments in Paris. There are so many miles, there are so many places, there are so many apartments and zip codes, and I wanted them all. I wanted public transportation and tall buildings. I wanted the Pacific, or the mountains, or a different breed of bird. I don’t know what I wanted—I just wanted.

And then we met an improbable group of people and started attending a church that met in a middle school. And I still wanted, still planned. Then, we bought our house. When we picked out our refrigerator, I told Jesse we just needed a fridge that would last us five years. The new goal. Stay in the house for five years (two years after graduation), get our money’s worth, leave. Always, leave.

I can’t tell you what happened. I hardly know. Or when it happened or when I changed my mind. I remember flashes, snippets of conversations. Sitting in Giorgio’s, sharing a giant plate of penne and sausage and spinach and a rosy cream sauce. Looking at Jesse as if he had just suggested we collect Great Dane puppies. You don’t want to move? The idea hadn’t occurred to me, that we might stay. We’ll talk about this another time, we decided. This is a decision we don’t have to make now.

And somewhere along the way, I changed too, and we never really had to have that discussion. Things shifted, things settled.

This past weekend, Jesse left town for a conference in Philadelphia. He left Thursday afternoon, and Thursday evening I turned on a dozen lights, the front porch light, the back light, the light over the stove, lamps, overhead lights. The house made noises I hadn’t noticed before. I wrote, but not as much as I should have. I couldn’t read—that would have been far too quiet—even though earlier I had checked out nearly a dozen books from the library.

Friday, though, I packed a duffle bag and grabbed my new sleeping bag and a cooler full of decent snacks (nuts, celery, almond butter, raisins, dark chocolate—a concession, yes, but one I was happy to make) and headed out the door. I met up with a group of our friends (Brandon and Kara—my China traveling companions—and four others, Mike and Kirsten, and Warren and Sharon and their five-month-old baby girl, Story) and we got on the road, heading to a place called Catfish Lake about an hour and a half north of Wilmington. Stew and Kat joined us later that evening.

Along the way, Mike and Kirsten’s car broke down, and while we waited for the tow truck we talked and took pictures of Story and threw popcorn into Warren’s and Mike’s mouths. An hour and a half later, we were all back on the road, in two cars rather than three this time.

Brandon’s cousin has a cabin at Catfish Lake. It’s in the middle of government-owned property, but the place has been in their family for generations and they can keep it as long as it stays in the family. You have to boat across the lake (which is shallow and so acidic that not much lives in it except for catfish) to get to the cabin, which is rustic, to say the least. As in, pump water into a bucket so you can flush the toilet.

We spent the weekend there, being lazy, cooking elaborate camp breakfasts of eggs, sausage, bacon, grits, toast, and biscuits. We ate fried baloney sandwiches and chili and venison stew and homemade coconut-chocolate-chip cookies. We played cards and “Mafia” and we read books and napped and talked about our brothers and politics and babies. We shot guns (okay, everyone shot guns and I shot a gun, once, and screamed while doing so—I’m not a gun fan) and took pictures. We cooed over Story.

Then on Sunday we packed everything up and cleaned the cabin and boated across the lake again and, tired and dirty, went home.

I don’t know if I can explain how a camping trip makes me realize I’m living where I want to live. I don’t know if I can tell you why I stopped wanting. Can I put into words how safe I felt with these people, how even though I was the only person on the trip whose spouse wasn’t there, I never felt alone? How I knew that if anything should happen to us, any one of these people would be right in the middle of it with us, that they would pick up any broken pieces, that they would clean up any messes. How, despite or in spite of our differences, we have a deep respect for one another. How these are the people I want to raise my children around. Home has been redefined.