We made tracks from Florida to Greenbelt, Maryland, making it to my parents' house a few days before they left on vacation. Since then, we've been staying here in the house, sleeping in the blessed air conditioning, using dad's car to run errands and his workbench to get a few major tasks accomplished for the RV, which sits parked outside.
I wasn't born in this house, but darn close; they signed the contract for it that day, and I don't remember any other. There are now a lot of grandchildren photos out among the children photos, but apart from that it's just like it always has been. My parents, unreformed packrats, have not changed a chair, painting, or place setting since I was a child. The same books sit on the same shelves. My bedroom was turned into my mom's office when my youngest brother left home, so we're staying in my brothers' old bedroom, which is probably the only thing that keeps me from regressing entirely to feeling like a twelve-year-old again.
The old downtown is a little different, new businesses in the old storefronts, but it still looks basically the same. My elementary school is now the Community Center, the swimming pool has added an indoor fitness center, but the library is still the library. I recognize a few people, or think I do. Greenbelt is a small city, 25,000 or so, and on its fringes it melds with the rest of the Washington DC metro megalopolis, but the core downtown area, "Old Greenbelt", is an accessible, comfortable town with sidewalks and shade trees. We've been jogging around Greenbelt Lake and took a nice bike ride through the park. I'm rediscovering that my hometown is a pretty nice place.
I'm thinking about this because we are thinking about where we want to get jobs and live for a while. At first, we had planned to return to Colorado, to Britt's hometown area near Durango. The problem is that there are not many high-tech jobs there, and with the recent fires the whole economic situation in that area is fairly grim.
But here in the DC area, it's a different story. Of course the general economic slowdown affects this region too, but there are still jobs galore in our rather specialized fields. Plus, we have leads here. In Boulder, Britt was network manager for NOAA's offices there; NOAA's headquarters are in Silver Spring, a few miles around the Beltway from here. While at the University of Maryland, I worked at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center here, and through my work NCAR in Boulder I had lots of contacts with NASA and NOAA scientists. We could get well-paying jobs here.
Most people, I think, stay in the area where they grew up. It's sort of the default situation, the easy way, sticking to the familiar. (Which is obviously not our style!) In the past week we've visited with my old friends from high school and college who are still here. We also know people in this area through boating and old work contacts. That, of course, is just one more insidious pull -- we'd have a whole social network already in place.
So why don't we just stay here? Well, what is it that we want, anyway? Making money and having friends is part of it, for sure. But we also want to have interesting jobs, jobs which have some sort of reason or goal that we support, jobs that when we read the employment ad we think, "Hey, that sounds cool." We don't want to commute through the thick swarms of automobiles we see daily here. We want to go hiking and biking in the mountains in our time off. We want to lay the groundwork for alternately working and cruising, or working while cruising part of the year. But we want to enjoy working, have it be something we do for ourselves as well as for money, and we want to enjoy living wherever we are. We don't want to be working just for the money, just for being able to go off and cruising. We want to live complete and happy lives. But doesn't everyone? And how many achieve it?
Sometimes it seems to us like we have too many conflicting criteria. We want to live in a small to medium-size community, but most of the jobs in our fields are in large cities. We want to work seasonally, but most interesting, professional jobs are permanent. I don't know. I guess we'll keep looking.