April: At Home in the Desert

Four things that make a place feel like home

Welcome to April’s update for paid subscribers!

Thanks for being a part of this little corner of the internet where good ideas (and occasional bad jokes) live. Your support keeps this project growing and evolving. If you like what you see, consider joining as a paid subscriber — it’s a small step for you, but a giant leap for independent creators everywhere.

---

On Thursday, I begin the second year at my Grand Junction rental. The fact that I am not putting anything into boxes and losing sleep over where I’m going to live next feels absolutely luxurious.

I have been bouncing around to new houses, cities, and states for the last decade.

• First, I lived in Boulder, Colorado from 2015 to 2020 and moved four times to different roommate/partnership arrangements.

• Then I lived in Bellingham, Washington from 2020 to 2022 (which was supposed to be the “settle down” spot), where I lived in an apartment for nine months, and a two-bedroom house for barely a year. I hated it.

• From 2022 to 2023, J and I lived in a 100 square foot camper in the Intermountain West, changing locations every 1-2 months.

• From 2023 to 2024, we moved back to Boulder with every intention of staying at least a couple of years. But J got laid off from work, Boulder is excruciatingly expensive, and something still didn’t feel quite right about it.

• In May 2024, we moved to Grand Junction on a hope and a prayer.

It’s been a year now, and barring something completely unexpected, I don’t have any plans to move. I’ll probably stay in Grand Junction a long time (hopefully at this rental, which I love). At a bare minimum, I am unlikely to ever leave the Western Slope.

In her book Desert Chrome, Kathryn Wilder sits at a diner in Moab, Utah, talking with Terry Tempest Williams and her husband, Brook.

“I’ve only moved three times in my life,” Terry says.

The waitress stops to light a candle before taking our orders, giving me time for a quick calculation: a fifteen-year-per-place average.

“Including changing houses, I’ve moved over thirty times in forty-five years,” I say. Easy math, even for me: an average of every year and a half.

They look at me as if I’ve just grown a beard. I am equally perplexed. I don’t know people who lived in the same place for as long as fifteen years.

I am perplexed for different reasons. Why don’t I seem to be able to stop moving? I don’t want to move. I hate it. I am so frustrated with myself that I haven’t been able to love a place and stay. For the last decade, I haven’t known how to stay put.

But maybe now I do. It’s funny how many times I’d come to ride bikes on the Western Slope and thought, “UGH I LOVE IT HERE,” but for some reason was never able to translate that into actually living here.

“Brook reaches across the table for my unused coaster, turning it over and drawing a rough map as he asks my course. The map grows into a sort of angular spiral of the West, with Hawai’i out there on the side.”

This is how I envision the map of the course of my (adult) life:

I know that the map is going to continue getting additions. But in the meantime, I’d like to watch the willow tree at the end of my neighborhood rush with green buds as summer creeps up the valley at least a few more times.

What Makes Grand Junction Home

I helped my dive shop sink an old helicopter into a lake on my instructor’s property

1. The Community

I value community above just about everything else in my life. Community is the driving force behind what makes a place feel like home. I might go so far as to say that community IS the meaning of life.