By Caitlyn Renee Miller

We promised to change by keeping everything exactly the same. No more traveling faraway places 365 days a year, living in Airbnbs, unpacking our scant belongings just to pack them back up, always planning the next move, the next place. That was done. We vowed to be normal.

It wouldn’t be hard to do, would it? My husband and I could pick a spot and just… stay. Right? Derek and I had stuck with each other for years, after all. And picking a place to live might be similar—the good kind of commitment, where time carves at you both in (mostly) rewarding ways.

We gave ourselves a soft landing: a year. We just had to make it one year—all of 2020—in a house in Maryland that needed watching over while its owners relocated. After that, there were only three viable choices for where we hoped to spend the rest of our lives: Canada, with its immigration officials adding up your “points” for the lottery—we might just barely have enough to squeak through; the Netherlands, where the Dutch-American Friendship Treaty would allow us to become residents but never citizens; or Portugal, with their generous visa for the self-employed.

I could imagine myself in any of the three if I just closed my eyes. I would be very tan in Porto or very pale in Apeldoorn. Easier still was imagining a new start in the Great White North. We were fresh off of two months in Quebec City, where we lived in a tall brick apartment complex so old, symmetrical, and charming that I called it the Wes Anderson building.

The decision didn’t need to be made right away; any of the three would be a great hub for more travel while we worked remotely—not to mention an escape from our home country, a place that broke our hearts over and over again. So, it was settled. We would base the decision on the immigration process that was the least onerous when the time came. Frankly, there’s only so much apostilling a person can handle before nowhere seems worth it.

But it’s always been worth it. Finding a place we loved (that would let us stay) taught me everything I like best about the world. For example, before inventing an alphabet, you must first have an incantatory name, like Sejong the Great (Korean), Vuk Karadžić (Serbian), or my favorite—Mesrop Mashtots (Armenian).

On the Greek island of Corfu, I was so distracted by the iridescence of every dead reptile on our daily hike up the mountain crowned by Pantokratoras Monastery that I started to feel like a lizard medical examiner.

One time, in a park in Batumi, Georgia, we watched a dog owner pick up after his dog, tie off the plastic bag, and hand it to the hulking animal, who took the knot in its mouth and trotted off to the nearest trash can, where he stood tall on his hind legs and dropped it inside. Derek and I, along with some Georgian guy, watched, rapt. We exchanged a look that only people who are watching a dog throw out his own shit can exchange.

These memories obsessed me the year we stayed still. They echoed in news reports of the devastation reshaping the world. Through months of watching everything come undone, making the choice of where to live kept us going. There was so much we didn’t know about the future, but making plans gave us the comforting illusion of control. So, we made a plan, and then, both very suddenly and very slowly, we committed to it.

We bought a house in an idyllic spot, a small place on three-quarters of an acre. We wired the money on a gloomy December day, because we couldn’t go in person. After checking the routing number for the sixth time, Derek clicked “send” with shaking hands. It was official: We were moving… to rural Virginia.

In that one year, normalcy took on a rattling urgency. We’d been right: In 2020 we would adjust to staying in one place. Except the uncertainty and chaos of that year made it clear that that place should be the land of our parents and siblings and nieces and nephew. Our friends who feel like family. All the people we didn’t want to live across a sealed border from. There were too many babies to hold and people to hug and life to be shared in person.

Instead of sending a postcard of a windmill or a maple leaf, I’m writing this from my couch in a little bungalow in a town of 1,500 people around the corner from the beach on the Eastern Shore—a place that was not part of the plan. We park our blue truck in front of a white fence and talk about what to plant in the spring. The trees are flowering; butterflies flit around the yard. I’m still getting the hang of being still. Maybe I always will be. But at least I’m home.

BIO:

Caitlyn Renee Miller's writing has appeared in the Atlantic, DIAGRAM, and McSweeney's, among others. She works as a ghostwriter and book editor and spends her free time collecting rare plants.