Remember when you wanted what you currently have?

on longing & gratitude

Nic Antoinette

May 13, 2024

189

Wild Letters is a newsletter about self-exploration and building a right-fit life.

Thank you for being here with me!

My dear reader.

In the summer of 2019 Gent and I took a six-week trip to the UK.

Aside from being something fun that we both genuinely wanted to do, that trip was a way for us to spend time together while continuing to delay the hard question of how the hell we were going to arrange the puzzle pieces of our lives so they fit together in a more functional way than our long-distance relationship had thus far made possible.

At the time he lived in Massachusetts with his father, in the house where they had both grown up, in a town I’d never heard of, within easy driving distance of almost all his family. He was geographically rooted in a way that I had never been, and yet he didn’t have any close friends in the area, nor did living there give him easy access to his favorite activity: backpacking in the high-elevation mountains. All the wage work he’d ever done was in that town — local hands-on jobs like landscaping, grave digging, antique barn restoration, a 10-year position at an ice rink that was part janitor, part Zamboni mechanic — and every boss at every job was someone he had known almost his entire life.

I, on the other hand, was recently divorced, living in the mountains of central Oregon in a 20 sq ft van named Trixie. I had beloved friends nearby, including my former spouse, as well as countless other loved ones spread out across the country. I wasn’t sure I understood what “home” even meant, not when the longest I had ever stayed in one city was six years, from the ages of 8-14 when my parents and I lived in London, and even in those six years we lived in three different apartments. When I moved into my little camper van in the spring of 2019 it was the 24th home I’d had in 34 years.

Work wise I was more flexible than Gent; being self-employed online meant that I could easily work from anywhere, but on the day I moved out of the home I had shared with my former spouse I was only earning enough money to pay myself between $1,500 and $1,800 per month — an amount that wouldn’t even cover rent in any of the cities where my loved ones lived.

And so when summer came, the question of where we should live and how we’d make the day-to-day of our relationship work felt like one that we just couldn’t answer. Gent didn’t want to move to Oregon and be so far from his family (especially with no work prospects and no guaranteed place to live), and I didn’t want to move in with my partner and his dad in an entirely unfamiliar town where I didn’t have a single friend. We both just felt so stuck, which is how we wound up on that plane to London — traveling as a kind of stopgap until we could come up with something more sustainable for the long-term.

We talked a lot about the future, our future, during that trip, in gently meandering conversations that always seemed to center on the smallest details of our ideal lives. Gent wanted to grow vegetables in a garden; I wanted to try fostering a litter of kittens. He longed for his own wood shop, a place to make canoe paddles and cutting boards, salad bowls and bud vases. I dreamed about my ideal little writing studio, as well as a cozy kitchen where I could finally follow after my late Calabrian grandmother and learn the art of homemade pasta. “I’ll build you a wooden drying rack for the noodles,” Gent said. “And we can make the pasta dough with eggs from the small flock of chickens I’d love to have pecking around the yard!”

The vision we crafted together that summer (which we had absolutely no idea how to turn into reality) was one that we began to call “pasta garden foster chicken.” A nonsensical stream of words to anyone else, but to us it was a verbal talisman, a sweet shorthand that helped us drop into that feeling of the slow and tender life we wanted together — especially during moments when we felt frustrated and overwhelmed at the questions of where we’d live, what it would cost, and how to merge our disparate lives when we returned from the UK.

“Pasta garden foster chicken,” we’d whisper to each other again and again. Which really meant: If we just keep holding onto this vision then maybe someday we’ll find a way to make it real.

The things that happened in the first year after we spoke our dream aloud — from summer 2019 to summer 2020 — were things that neither of us could ever have predicted.

Collectively we were thrust into the crisis of a global pandemic. Simple measures of public health and safety became hotly politicized. Breonna Taylor was murdered. George Floyd was murdered. Wildfires scorched more than 24 million hectares of land in Australia.

Closer in, on a deeply personal level, I lost over 50% of my hair from the residual stress and grief of divorce and major life upheaval. The most significant friendship of my life ended with absolutely no closure. My father got diagnosed with a rare blood cancer.

Somewhere amidst all of that Gent and I fell even more in love. And yet that love did not bring us any closer to an answer of where we would live and what would need to change in order to make our relationship work.

Pasta garden foster chicken, we kept whispering.

But… how?

It has now been almost five years since that UK trip where we wandered through pre-pandemic streets, our hearts filled with longing for a life and a home that did not seem possible. It was just a dream back then, a fragile wisp of imagination, something soothing to fantasize about as we curled together in the dark.

During those five years I lived in my van; I lived in a room I rented inside a friend’s apartment; I lived in hotels; I lived in Airbnbs; I lived at Gent’s dad’s house; I lived in my tent on the Colorado Trail, the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail. And even though none of those places felt like they were putting me directly on the path to where I live now — in a house built in 1850 that Gent’s family owns — it turns out that sometimes you do not need to follow a discernible path in order to wind up where you wanted to be.

Which is to say that last week, in the warmth of the early spring sun, Gent taught me how to use an impact driver and together we built the first two raised beds for our soon-to-be vegetable garden. There aren’t any foster kittens here, but as we worked we could hear our 11 chickens scratching around through piles of leaves nearby, our two young dogs chasing each other wildly through the yard. There are fresh eggs in the kitchen, right next to a pasta maker that I borrowed from the folks who live across the street.

Pasta garden foster chicken, indeed.