An Athens County Almanac

Environmental Literature was a way to skip out on taking a science class my senior year in high school. It was the slacker option for seniors, frequented by those lacking the grades or the motivation to take something more difficult. However, it was while reading Aldo Leopold, Ed Abbey and Annie Dillard that I realized how important my environment and sense of place is to me.

And I have destroyed it.

Not in the sense of global warming or deforestation, or any of the other pressing problems that need to be dealt with by the world community. No, I destroyed my sense of place through work, college, and travel, and in the process became, in a way, homeless.

A nomad is someone who “wanders from place to place” according to the dictionary; a person who is lacking a permanent home.

I live in a three-bedroom apartment with two roommates. My lease will be up in June, when I’ll move into a three-bedroom house with the same two roommates. Our lease will again expire the next June as we graduate college and are thrown our different ways into the world.

My house in Dayton, where my family lives, is no longer my home. It hasn’t been since I left there in September of 2005 and moved into the dorms for the first time. It wasn’t simply that my parents knocked out the wall of my room and combined it with my younger sister’s, leaving me the guest bedroom in the basement, it was the awful foreboding sense that as soon as I walked out that door with my stuff packed, I would never be coming home in the same way again.

This summer, I spent two months living and working in Cairo, Egypt. It too, was a temporary home, one that I learned to love and hate as is common to every place. And then I left, to come back to the United States, back to Dayton, back to school.
And even now, when I am relatively settled, my work life and school life keeps me away from my apartment more hours than I am there. So it feels more like a convenient place to crash than a home.

I have heard from many people that Junior year of college is stressful, difficult, and hard. They haven’t being lying – more than once I’ve wanted to drop out of school and start working, if just for a change of pace. As a good friend of mine put it, by this point we’ve gotten good at school. We know how to handle the classes, how to study, how to write papers, how to procrastinate. Our classes may be hard, but school is no longer hard. In essence, we’re ready for a different kind of challenge.

The bottom line is that right now I don’t fit in. I’m happy to be back, but am also looking ahead to the next trip I’m planning. I hear my friends talk about graduation and jobs and the next step in their lives. And when I do I inwardly curse the extra year I have to flounder and feel frustrated.

The contemporary Bedouin of the Sinai bemoan the loss of their nomadic ways, having to settle in order to make lives for themselves and their families. I feel for them, because at the end of the day, after I work and I study and I sit down, there’s still something left. I’m still just restless.