Back to the future

Today, I drove through a neighborhood I used to call home as an elementary school kid. Most of the neighborhood looks exactly as it did when I lived on this road. You have the townhouses, now aging and in need of a new pant job. The round church I spent every Sunday and Wednesday in for four years. The "new" townhouses which are no longer new, and painted an adobe red rather than crisp white. And then you have where my house used to sit.

Where my house used to sit is now occupied by apartment complexes. Huge buildings with fabricated stucco and rock. Where once I used to ride my bike, there is a fountain. Where once we used to play soccer in a large field, there is a parking lot. This is the result of change and progress.

I am nostalgic for the past, happy about the present, and excited for the future.

This neighborhood is where my brothers learned how to fall so perfectly they needed trips to the emergency room. This is the neighborhood I was introduced to the hot Arizona sun when moving in the middle of a summer from a humid Pampa, Texas town. This is the neighborhood I learned how horrible a bus ride to school was. My parents would work hard to support us in this neighborhood, with my mom staying home and my dad doing a job completely out of his profession of choice. I used to love sneaking into the neighbor's yard to eat the pecans that fell from her tree. I loved walking around the block that was overshadowed with old trees, good people, and places I loved to be. This neighborhood is less than one mile from where I work now.

It is strange, going back to a place you are so familiar with. You see things differently than you once did with a child's eyes. Those "new" townhouses were being built when I lived on this street. My brothers and I would play house in the under construction buildings. I could look from my backyard and see one of two major roads running through Scottsdale, and I think back to how rural Scottsdale Road at one time appeared, and how it now appears. Every day I walk through the past for a brief moment, remembering one memory after the next.

My present; the location of where I live, where I work, who I am dating, where my kids go to school are separated at any given day by 2,500 miles. I live my days wishing I could be at home while I am at work, getting things done. While driving the kids to school I wish for the day I am able to see the man with whom I am so happy with on the other side of the country. This is hard, at best. Some days I feel like I am three different people, attempting to juggle all at once. And, while I have never been asked to juggle, I am also a perfectionist at relationships, and harder on myself than anyone if I feel I have failed the kids, if I feel I am failing in my relationship, or failing at work. My present is filled with current times being made into memories, moments to cherish.

While I can never go back to that neighborhood as it was when I was growing up, I can always make my current life the happiest I can. I have that choice. I may not be able to control everything that occurs in my life, I have the choice to make the best out of what I have. This is the future. This is the exciting part where we do not know where our journey may take us, but there is always a destination to get to, and another moment to make. Like that neighborhood, I have changed, too. I miss that neighborhood much like I miss aspects of who I was as a younger woman, so sure of my future, and strong in my beliefs. I am still that person in many ways, but I too have developed as my world around me changed.