Where Do You Fit?

This wasn't my exact view but it's pretty darn close...

Yesterday morning on my drive to work, I happened to look over my left shoulder at one of the bends in the road and through the fields I could see the soft, rolling hills, a gentle mist clinging to their curves. They caught me off guard, their lovely sentinel causing me to imagine what they were like in a time before "civilization" cluttered the view with all of its stuff. I've driven that route over a hundred times and never noticed the spots in the landscape where they are so evident and I swear the beauty of my home state just struck me somewhere deep and elemental.

Civilian life has not been an easy transition for neither my husband nor myself and frequently over the past several years this place has not felt like home at all. It has feel more like a place I used to know and many times I've said to myself, "I don't belong here. I don't fit here. I don't know where I fit, but this just feels wrong." On my drive yesterday, for the first time I felt as if North Carolina was truly in my bones. It may not be the only place on earth that would feel like home, but it's certainly one of them and I'm so grateful to finally be less disconcerted about being here.

The worse boss I ever had once said to me, "You're not a good fit here." While I wholeheartedly believe she is neither an effective leader, nor a decent human being based on the deceitful things I witnessed her do and the condescending way she treated her employees (... not just me), she was absolutely spot on about that. In my many travels with my husband's Air Force career, it was easy to tell the new places where we hit the ground running and fit right in verses the ones we didn't. The places we didn't required work in order to make life harmonious. The older I get, the less inclined I am to force myself into any mold where I don't easily, readily belong.

No place is perfect, although for me our mountains certainly come close. No job is ideal, although being a writer and reading teacher to little humans is just about there. And people certainly aren't perfect, but I wouldn't trade not one single member of my Tribe for anything! In fact, it is our collective imperfections that have helped forge such tight bonds. Who knew a reminder of this could come from Mother Nature's misty morning hills tucked away in Western North Carolina on a nearly forgotten highway drive to work?