A couple of weeks ago, I decided that my next life goal is to do a split.

I have never been very flexible--in life, maybe, but definitely not physically. I have been a runner for as long as I can remember, and for me that was a very low-maintenance identity. You put on your shoes and you went, and I never made the time to stretch before or after. I still drag myself out of bed in the mornings for a quick run, but there's a lot more to me these days.

I've been thinking a lot about what it means to stretch lately--to find yourself doing new things when you thought you knew who you were already. A runner then a CrossFitter then a not much of anything-er, suddenly finding herself at the barre six times a week, daydreaming about split stretches and standing up on tiptoes.

"The whole of life becomes an act of letting go," Yann Martel wrote in Life of Pi.

But maybe life is more of a stretch than anything else.

Last night, after a challenging afternoon with our puppy that ended in me absolutely needing ice cream, Rob came home from a Hornets game and we ended up driving to the Dairy Queen in Plaza Midwood for a late-night dessert.

It was one of those muggy spring nights that feels more like summer than anything else--79 degrees at 9:45 PM, windows down on the highway with the new Death Cab for Cutie album blaring, hair sticking to my damp shoulders. A line around the corner for ice cream and the smell of honeysuckle in the air.

It felt a lot like home.

Lately we've been talking about what our life might look like if Rob had to travel for work, and the other day I had a bit of a breakdown when what had been excitement and opportunity turned temporarily into sadness and frustration: I've worked really hard for this home. We said we wouldn't move again, so we found a running path and a coffee shop and we got a dog and I painted a wall in our bedroom and bought a six-month barre membership. Because we live here. 

When we moved here last August and I didn't like it, I pushed through and forced myself to call it home. And it worked--we live here and I like it.

It means something to belong somewhere, even if you have to force it at first.

But I always manage to find pieces of myself everywhere we go. There will be warm nights and chocolate-dipped ice cream cones that remind me of my childhood; and every time I hear Little Wanderer I'll remember that first spring after we were married when we drove around Charlotte for no reason at 10 PM on a Wednesday, breathing in the humid air and wondering what might be next for us. 

Whether it's a hotel room in New York City or a house with a front porch and a backyard in Charlotte, home will always be wherever we find ourselves.

Photo by V.A. Photography.

On Sunday morning I woke up to a drizzly rain and that fresh smell of air that whispers promises of spring.

I poured a cup of coffee and Ender and I went outside for a walk, where it suddenly dawned on me that I had never done this before--the warmer air, the rain, the coffee, this dog. We are on the precipice of a new season in a new city, once again, and that means so much to me--new memories to make and routines to establish, but this time with the feeling that we are possibly here to stay, not just passing through for one summer, one fall, one winter, one spring.

Spring has such a familiar smell and feeling--it reminds me of chilly April mornings in Charlottesville, where I worked as a barista every morning and drank iced coffee all day while I wrote my master's thesis from the old kitchen table we borrowed from my parents' basement. Sunscreen and Shawna and Patrick and Chad and Rob--I had such a little family of friends right there in the neighborhood. We went out to dinner and ran together and had so much coffee and the occasional bucket of mimosas on a porch somewhere. Looking back on it now feels like such a dream--so idyllic, so long ago, so far from reach.

But more than that, the beginning of spring reminds me of Roanoke, and sitting outside at the lake wrapped in a blanket with a cup of coffee in my hand. Of sweet Rocky frolicking about, even at the ripe old age of fourteen. Weekday sushi lunch dates with friends and entire Saturdays spent downtown, just wandering. Wet grass and that early morning haze, hovering above the lake's surface. Our life at Smith Mountain Lake was something I always hoped--but never actually attempted--to emulate in my own home.

Nostalgia has always been a big part of my life, but lately it feels like more of a crutch than a source of peace. My family is changing and my parents have plans to sell the dreamy house on the lake that I have used to create and then safeguard so many memories over the past ten years. So much of me is in that kitchen, the bookshelves, scattered around that big open living room, gathered around the table. While I know that our lives are not where our parents live, I've still been struggling with the new, blank canvas that is stretched out ahead of us.

At what point do we have to stop looking back for comfort and start creating something new to stand on? There will still be coffee and friends and family and my sweet husband to wake up next to and that smell of sunscreen on my skin after a warm day spent outside. It's a new place, a new season, a new opportunity; and it can be either scary or inspiring. I'm leaning toward the latter--finding the hope that lives at the bottom of most things and using it to move forward--both because I want to and because sometimes, I have to.