Is This What Home Feels Like?

This is what AI thinks my house looks like. Close enough for a banner image!

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I still haven’t gotten used to the trees.

It’s a funny thing, that, considering that I grew up in heavily-forested areas of Connecticut and New York, and have also lived in the green spaces of Idaho and Ohio and Georgia and Virginia and New Hampshire.

But after 8 years in the desert (even with time away), the daily presence of trees everywhere I go feels almost surreal.

And of course, it actually rains here! A lot!

North Carolina is alive in a way few places I’ve been seem to be. There is a richness, a deep, dark hue to the greens here that is unlike anywhere I’m used to. The trees in Virginia seem an almost pastel color compared to this. Even the deciduous trees in Raleigh are in shades of evergreen.

Each morning here, I find myself waking up later than I’d like. The closeness of old oaks to our house means that even the East-facing windows of the master bedroom only let in dappled flickers of morning light. When I sleep, I sleep deeply, waking up fewer times per night, clocking more hours in the unconscious realm, even dreaming, which I rarely remember doing. The other day, I woke up, looked at the clock, and saw with a surprise that it was 11AM.

I don’t think I’ve slept in that late since college!

On the flip side, the energy here is different. Crisp, upbeat, vibrant. I have become more sensitive to such things, and as my awareness has broadened I’ve come to realize that every place on this earth seems to vibrate to a different frequency. Some vibrations are harmonious with your own. Others are discordant. Sorry if that’s too woo for some of you, but physics tells us we are energetic beings at the most fundamental level of our construction, and I think as such, we perceive fluctuations in the energy of our environment more acutely than we are consciously aware of.

It’s probably why I always feel most at peace in the mountains, the old-growth forests, or sitting and watching the surf on the coast. There is an ancient, overpowering energy there that subsumes the chaos of my own.

Most of us here at Chateaux Skojec have alternated between better sleep and an almost manic insomnia since we’ve arrived. I’m not at all sure it’s time zone lag, though it does seem to be on a several-hour delay. It’s rare, in the 10 or so days we’ve been at the new place, for me to get to sleep before 3AM. In Phoenix, I rarely made it to midnight. I can’t get any of the kids in bed on time, and my wife, who usually falls asleep at a reasonable hour, has been a borderline night owl.

None of us who have had restless nights full of tossing and turning knows the why of it. We are not experiencing anxiety, or foreboding, just a sense of energetic alertness that keeps us awake. I’ve found that even my normal drowsiness-inducing substances, be it a couple of drinks or an adult gummy, knock me out before the wee hours like they usually do.

Everything here is different. The difference is good. But it’s a bit surreal and takes some getting used to. I have never spent more than a single 24 hour period in this city before we rather impulsively decided to try to make it home. I don’t know the area, the streets, the neighborhoods, the stores, or the restaurants — although much is turning out to somehow also be familiar. For example, there’s a Wegman’s a few minutes from the house, and as a native upstate New Yorker who grew up going to Wegman’s before it expanded outside the empire state, I can’t enter that place without feeling as though I’m somewhere I belong. (If you’re not familiar, it’s arguably the best supermarket in America.)

The call to go east was a call to go home, and I am surprised to find myself saying that I already feel more at home in this house than I have in any place I’ve lived in my adult life. I don’t understand how that works. This is yet another rental, not a permanent family homestead. But there is a coziness and peaceful feeling to the place that envelops and soothes, like a warm blanket fresh from the dryer on a chilly, rainy day.

That said, the air remains charged with the crackling energy of change.

New starts. New business ideas. A nation coming apart at the seams, the decline nevertheless almost imperceptible in this idyllic little neighborhood, with its brick homes and manicured lawns and flowering trees and daily walkers passing by. There are “Sesame Street Lights” (if you know, you know) and a lovely green with geese and a gazebo, and a nice little park, and a fountain in a pond. The first night we were here, I could hear the local high school marching band from my driveway. Must have been a football game. It was almost a cliche level of Americana, and I loved it.

Were it not for the significant percentage of folks here from central and eastern Asia, it would almost feel like the American South of a decade or two ago. I’m told they migrate here because it’s an area with an unusual number of tech jobs, but they have found ways to make it their home, too. There are certain surprises that come with that — I’ve seen four Hindu temples within a five mile radius of the house, but only one Catholic parish — but cultural diversity brings a richness that I always appreciate, especially after my time in New Hampshire where the only places in town to eat were pizza & sub shops or Italian joints. Our first dinner out as a family here was at a lovely little Ramen and Sushi bar run by folks who were actually from Japan. A trip to Patel Brothers scored us a family-size tin of Earl Grey from Ahmad Tea. There’s a really nice H-Mart not too far away with an entire wall just dedicated to kimchi, and we brought home everything we needed to grill up some Korean BBQ. My 18-year-old daughter’s boba cravings will never go unmet. And there’s no end to the number of restaurants from around the world — not just Mexican and Chinese and Japanese and Indian and Vietnamese and Thai, but also Uzbek and Turkish and Ethiopian and Iraqi and Nepali and Laotian and more. I just now found a Szechuan place that has Fuqi Feipian, one of my favorite dishes — and one that’s often incredibly hard to find, even in bigger cities!

It’s a rapidly diversifying area, but in the more positive sense of the term. Nobody is beheading ducks or eating cats or camping on other folk’s front lawns without their permission.

As I watch the news, day by day, it’s hard not to be struck by the contrast. This place feels like an oasis from the madness, but I can only wonder how long it will last. The streets are clean, the architecture is beautiful, the vegetation pervasive and maintained, the businesses well-kept. There is both the hustle and bustle of a larger city, but also the more laconic, slower pace of a smaller town. The population in the metro Raleigh area is one-tenth that of Phoenix, so it’s quite a change of pace, but it really seems to strike a sweet spot between “too big” and “too small.”

Our appliance installer, a native Cuban who grew up in Miami, told us he came here a few years back after COVID killed his business there. “The people here,” he said, with an accent and cadence reminiscent of Dezi Arnaz in his prime, “drive very, very slowly. But they are super nice. It’s not an act. You have to slow down, but you get used to it. I love it here.”

It’s the same story everyone here tells. Wherever they’re from, they came here at some point and ended up deciding they didn’t want to leave.

Our moving truck driver was a native. He told me the story of a gentleman who moved here to retire, only to find the garage of his new house full of 27 bags of trash, left by the previous owner.

“I told him, ‘Sir, when I get done with my shift tonight, I’m gonna go home, get my pickup, and come back and get those out of here for you.’ He told me I didn’t need to do that, and I said, ‘I know I don’t. But that’s not how people here treat others, and I’m ashamed that’s what they did, so I’m going to come get that trash out here for you.’ He called me later to tell me not to worry about it, because when he Realtor found out, she sent her husband over to clear it out!”

Imagine that. Like the good old days, when people had pride in their home town. Reminds me of the kind of thing my grandfather would have done.

On the way to the grocery store last night, I took a back road out of our subdivision as instructed by the GPS, and found myself driving by acres of old farms. It’s a weird blend of country and city, but more than that, an unexpected mélange of the things we like about a number of other cities we’ve visited or lived in. There are upscale shopping centers and attractive, contemporary buildings that remind me of Scottsdale, a diverse food scene and heavily forested commercial areas like Northern Virginia, some of the colonial architecture and old-brick downtowns of New England, Virginia, and New York, and the southern charm of places like Dallas and Atlanta. Lakes and ponds abound, as do forests. The coast, although we haven’t visited yet, is only two hours away. Every day as I drive around, I feel as though I’m navigating a quilt of patchwork memories, sewn together into one location that seemingly has it all.

I’m wary to fall in love too soon. I’ve been burned before.

I wonder, since our departure from Arizona came as a response to an urgent, inscrutable impulse to get out of dodge and “go home,” if this was where whatever force of the universe was calling us wanted us to be. It was very clearly not Virginia. I’ve never felt such interior pushback on arriving at a place. As I believe I previously described, it was like “touching a nine-volt battery to my soul.”

So here we sit, unpacking boxes and setting up furniture and doing the things one does when moving in, feeling like our heads are still spinning. People don’t do this, I think. They don’t just impulsively move to a new place in their late 40s with a gaggle of kids where they don’t know anyone and just hope for the best.

But for some reason, we do, and we did, and here we are. In a way, I guess you could say we’re immigrants looking for a better life, too.

I won’t be lulled to sleep, though. I’m deeply concerned about what’s happening in the rest of the country, and the rest of the world, too. I’m beginning to feel it may be time to start writing about it more. We are being manipulated and gaslit every day, even as what appears to be some kind of plan to actively undermine and subvert our society is carried out, all-but-under-the-radar, the information only showing up in places like X, where Elon Musk has managed to keep speech free for just a little while longer.

Maybe X, like Raleigh, is just on a few years’ delay.

As I get settled in and make more time for writing, I will likely be exploring these ideas and concerns a bit further. If I do so, I may separate them out into a different ‘stack altogether, keeping this one focused on personal development, religious deconstruction, and so on. I’m still working through the chaos of creation in my mind.

Thank you all for your understanding, patience, support, and even prayers as we’ve made this transition. I am desperate for stability, for myself and my family, and I hope that we can find a way to make it work here for a long time to come. It feels like we made the right choice, whatever that means, but now we just have to prove that we can flourish here.

I’ve got a good feeling about it.