On being a gypsy.

Mulling over my unusual state of being tonight.

This past May marked three years of my family and I residing in this house.

Since I've been born, that's the first time this has happened. Before now there's only been one other time that I've even lived in the same town for three years. And that was the town I was born in, and left at the age of six (after having lived in four - wait, five - different locations).

Since leaving that town at that young age, this family has always been a bunch of travelers. We had parents/grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins to visit. They all still lived in their 30-mile radius of each other, so we, the adventurers, would frequently turn our adventure back for a visit. That frequent trip made the making of other trips seem much more possible. Stay in one place and your brain will think, why should I go anywhere? It's too much trouble. Here is good. But venture forth frequently, and when some other place beckons, your brain will think, eh, I've already been going to a lot of trouble. I don't see any reason to stop now. So we didn't.

With such a childhood, as soon as I started driving I didn't see any reason why I couldn't take myself and my car wherever I happened to want to go. Within reason. So I started making solo 500-mile road trips a month after I became a licensed driver. And my car has seen a lot of country since then.

I just realized this evening that in the last 50 days my vehicular wanderings have not taken me further away from this spot of land than that same number of miles.

Feelings of stability are starting to creep in.

I'm probably one of the few persons on the planet who would greet stability with a skeptical eye.

I seem to specialize in being unordinary.

In an interesting turn of events, now that I've actually been home for a while - so at home that I've spent about half of those 50 days without even driving down the street - my home life has become more unsound than it's been in a large number of years. What I mean by that is that we've spent many days wondering where we're going to get food, wondering if our electricity is going to be shut off, wondering if we're going to be able to wash our clothes properly anytime soon. I've spent much of these past three years taking regular jaunts, even extended departures, away from my home without being overly concerned how I'm going to find something to fill my stomach, charge my cell phone, and wash my favorite shirt. But now that I'm not going anywhere, the kitchens' offerings are perpetually meager, we're furtively looking through the blinds to see if an electric company truck pulls in, and I spent a month handwashing clothes, hoping every day that I wouldn't do something to get extraordinarily dirty because I knew that my clothes probably wouldn't get very clean.

Go figure.

I guess life was determined to interject some kind of instability somehow.

I think I prefer the former type.