After months of planning and over a week of driving, the postpartum blues have set in. It’s like the day after Christmas feeling that you got as a kid, realizing that all of the buildup is suddenly over and you didn’t get a pony or even a Red Ryder BB gun. We’re cold and lonely and hating it here.
Actually, we only hate it occasionally. We talk each other into leaving the house, only to get lost even with a GPS in a bizarre pattern of one-way streets. Last night we tried to look for a Starbucks, ending up in the middle of the silent deserted campus, cursing the display screen that kept telling us that we were in Starbucks at that very moment, possibly even enjoying coffee and Christmas carols while we basked in the loving warmth of small-town America. We went back home where we made our own coffee and microwaved the GPS in a gleeful fit of destruction.
We are woefully unprepared for the weather here. Right now it is 10F out, yet deceptively sunny. How is that even possible? I’m lacking in basic warm clothing – long sleeve shirts, warm socks, long underwear, etc. I’ve ordered winter boots for both of us, which should arrive bright and early tomorrow morning, and I do own fingerless gloves, which are a godsend. However, they make me feel like a starving writer, living in a Parisian garret, burning pages from books to keep warm.
We keep telling each other that it will get better when school starts, which it will. We aren’t very social people to begin with, and usually spent most of our time at home in California, but now that we literally know no one in town and the choice has been taken away from us, we miss human interaction horribly.
I realize that I’m like a kid at camp, writing her first letter home, and that in a month I’ll be loving it here, happily sporting my IU clothing like the rest of the town. (But never a Colts jersey. Never. Even though I’ve always had a soft spot for Peyton.) In fact, I’m considering buying a Indiana sweatshirt ASAP so I can feel like I fit in. Also, I’m a bombshell in red. In the meantime, however, the other kids in my cabin hate me, the mosquitoes won’t leave me alone, and I’ll never pass my swim test.
