I’m moving.

That is a big change.

For those who have been along for the ride, I left my beautiful house in Staunton, Virginia seven years ago to go the suburban Maryland and be a city girl. Or a suburban girl, anyway. Or woman. Except now I’m the age I like to be thought of as a girl again.

But never mind all that.

I’ve had a great time in those seven years.

I taught school again. I worked with amazing clients. I gave some talks. I got through Covid. I lost and gained quite a few pets.

Mostly, I was near my grown children.

For anyone living near your grown children, you know what a lovely lovely thing that is.

Especially if you are yourself dealing with some medical vulnerabilities, like eye issues and also breaking your ankle so badly, the surgeon himself admired his own handiwork several years later and said, “I don’t know how I managed to fix that!”

But the time has come for more change—as we all know is its wont.

I’m moving back to Virginia!

I’m mostly very very happy about this and, having spent a night at my new house, realize how much I missed my “native air,” as Jane Austen called it. It’s dark here, it’s quiet, and my first roommate was a wolf spider, who, fortunately, I recognize as harmless.

I know the trees behind my house, I know my way around, I have family here.

For all these reasons, it’s a very good plan and I’m happy.

But it was a bumpy road getting here.

I thought about all I was going to lose—the proximity to my kids, my doctors, a lovely group of friends and dogs in my apartment complex, a busier business environment.

So the process just went step by step, testing each one to be sure it seemed solid, taking the next. Prepared to take direction from the universe but not necessarily from my own, divided mind.

Because part of me loves to change—I have often thought that, if there is a cliff anywhere in the neighborhood, I will be the first one off it.

And part of me is more of a scaredy-dog than my puppy Morwyn is, who loves people, kids, other dogs, Fiona, me, my sons—and is afraid of everything else in the world.

So I know not to trust myself when it looks like it might be time to jump.

To be fair, I have made some really terrible tumbles.

And I have made some spectacularly successful switches.

Someone asked one of my great-aunts at the end of her life if there was anything she regretted doing. She had lived a remarkably admirable life, though not a very adventurous one.

“No,” she said after thinking about the question. “But there is a lot I regret not doing.”

I was listening to an NPR On Point show last week, as is my wont driving to the dentist.

This one was about quitting—how hard it is to quit even when it seems like a really good idea. The idea of losing what we already have is, for most of us, an overwhelming one and causes us to stay where we are.

But, like my great-aunt, more people end up regretting what they didn’t do rather than what they did.

If your career feels stale, flat, and unprofitable, to quote the Bard through Hamlet’s voice, then it might be time to think about change.

Let me know if that is something on your mind.

In the meantime, you will find me head down in a cardboard box, somewhere between Maryland and Virginia