Yes, some mornings I feel like Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now! when he peers through the Venetian blinds in his hotel room and confirms that he's still in Saigon and not back in the jungle where he feels most comfortable.
There are still moments like that when I ask myself, "What the hell am I doing in Arkansas?" and the full realization hits me that this is not just a vacation or odd little excursion - I really am living in Arkansas, some 500 miles from my various Indiana homes.
I've been here a little more than a year now and most of the weirdness has subsided.
I love our new house. It's such a pleasure to go from a century-old Victorian where something always needs fixing or upgrading to a three-year-old house where everything is new and works just fine.
I even enjoy mowing the lawn, since we stepped up to a John Deere riding mower from the self-propelled walk-behind model I used at our Thorntown, Ind. house.
Just about everything cost less here - water, electricity, gasoline, clothing, groceries.
And we proved we could survive the blazing hot days of summer. Now we're in the prolonged glow of an Arkansas autumn and heading for another mild (by Indiana standards) winter. We only had an inch of snow on two occasions last winter and it was gone the next day.
So maybe I'm getting over the shock of being uprooted and flung into the Mid-South. If I were back in Indiana, chances are I'd be squinting out into a gray frosty morning from my bedroom window, muttering, "Indiana. Shit!"
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