A Momentous Walk through the Parking Lot

Photo taken at Shaw Nature Reserve, Missouri, 2010 by the author


As I walked across the grocery store parking lot after work today, I looked contentedly up to the blue sky filled with enormous white clouds. I love the clouds in the midwest. I love that it RAINS here and that even if it doesn't rain, there can be days with massive meandering clouds slowly making their way across the heavens. In the evenings, these clouds are lit from behind by a pink and purple sunset filtered through golden sunlight. Rippling clouds are blazoned by a fiery red in the sun's full morning fury.

Every place I have lived has its own unique beauty and I appreciated the East Coast, South West, South East, but there is something about the midwest that resonates with me the most. Since moving to St. Louis, I have often looked back at living in Tucson with a sense of haziness and distaste, like I simultaneously feel as if I had never really lived there (it was all an uncomfortable dream that I'd rather forget) or if I really had lived there, that I never truly enjoyed it. When these thoughts surface, I check myself and think, "No, I did like some of it, I know I did live there, it was sort of nice for the time I was there."

Looking up at the clouds before entering the local Schnucks to buy some dinner for a picnic at the Botanical Gardens, brought a memory to mind that helped me come to terms with my feelings for Tucson in a small way. When I had first moved there, the whole city, climate, and certain aspects of the overall culture, rubbed me the wrong way. I hated the BRIGHT sun, the lack of rain, the harshness. The entire first year I lived there, I couldn't get Missouri out of my mind. I was constantly dreaming of it, talking about it, missing the weather, people, activities, rivers...everything. The whole first year, I wanted to move back to Missouri because even in that first year everything about my life was harsh- not just the plant life and weather of the region, but the circumstances and relationships in my life.

One morning, as I half-woke and lay in my bed, I groggily thought to myself, "I like it here" and promptly fell back to sleep. That was the random moment that I decided I did appreciate the beauty and strangeness that the Southwest had to offer, but it was also more of a resignation to it than a full embracing. The subsequent years were filled with school and intense circumstantial difficulties which never seemed to let up and increased year after year.

Remembering this made me even happier that I am now back in St. Louis. Looking back at that initial reaction to Tucson, I see that it was never where I was meant to stay. Sometimes I doubt that I should have moved to Tucson at all and instead should have moved back to St. Louis in that first year when I missed it so much. Thinking like that doesn't help, though, and I choose to trust God that it was all part of His grand plan. It seems more fitting that the worst, most intense, and yet most growth-filled years of my life were in a land of such puzzling contradictions- vast beauty in the midst of, and often because of, extreme harshness. When I reflected on this, all in the space of a 1.5 minute walk across a parking lot (thoughts move so much faster than essays about thoughts), it left me with a profound peace that I was never meant to stay permanently in Tucson. I was there for a purpose and a time, which thankfully, has come to an end.

There are so many climates and regions in this country and world that everyone can resonate with at least one of them and choose to settle in that place. There is something so special about finding a place one loves and as I stared smiling at the fluffy white clouds over my head and thought of the picnic I was going to have in the grass, under trees on this beautiful day, I was grateful. Extremely grateful and happy.