We've just passed Des Moines and we're coming up over Omaha. There's 2 hours and 24 minutes left, on this flight, and though I have had a very wonderful weekend, and my evening and day with my mother and aunt was very wonderful and she made me the tuna noodle salad I have been craving for months and it was perfect and I bought a pair of black pants and she sent me off to travel with a banana and a granola bar packed in my little lunch sack and I felt very loved, all I am thinking now is home, home, home, home, HOME. I am going home.

All weekend, people were asking me how I was, and how I was doing, and what I did, exactly, all day, and I said that I'm really good! I'm doing really well! I'm totally a professional blogger and am a writer, too. They all said great! And I said, isn't it? And then they said, and how's Utah? very skeptically, waiting for me to launch into my anti-Utah, anti-Mormon, all-miserable rant, because how could you move to Utah from San Francisco and not be totally miserable, and that is not a question, that is a statement. Except I moved from San Francisco to Utah, and while there are other very major factors contributing to my daily quality of life, most of which have been detailed on this very site, there also is the fact that I like Utah, and I am happy.

I am as astonished as you are. I came to live in the place with just as many prejudices as most people have about the place. I mean, it's Utah, right? The Mormons, the conservatives who are generally Mormons, the weird liquor laws, the basic, overall impression of being just--Utah. You know what I mean, right? People think backwater, barely sophisticated, flyover state, meth addicts and tract homes and lower middle-class mediocrity and maybe some skiing, right? Oh, right, there's that one film festival, but no one pays any attention to that, do they?

Now--hi, I live here and please don't think that about my state, and only a little part of that is because it's a little embarrassing to have people think I live in a backwoods incestuous hicktown and am 4th wife of 57, each of us with fewer teeth than the last, but because Utah kind of rules.

We drove through the canyon last weekend as the sun was setting, and I realized that they were growing on me, these mountains that take over the sky, and that this aggressive, broad-shouldered landscape is growing on me. The people are ridiculously kind, from Mormons to punk rock kids, and the city is a surprising liberal bubble. I have met people who have moved here from Seattle and Portland and San Francisco, and we are, all of us, startled to find that this is not just beautiful country, but a very beautiful city, and the temple is right at the center but it's not the heart of the place, and that we are happy to live here, to know that we don't always have to watch our mouths when we talk about politics or art or religion and music. It takes some digging, but there they are, the coffee shops and bars and restaurants and bands and underground newspapers and the people that you want to know. The lattes, you know, taste just the same as the lattes back home and are not at all annoying. 

The definition of home has been fluid for me, my whole life. It was the Bronx when we were forcibly deported to Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania when I moved to New York. It is true that Jersey City, all four years of it, never became home to me--New York, I said, when I moved to San Francisco. Then San Francisco became home very quickly. I wonder if I'll ever say "back home" and mean Utah.  At one point, I thought it would not ever, could not ever happen. But I've realized that I am not biding my time, waiting to move back to San Francisco, or on to the next city I may or may not call home--I'm happy to be living in my little town, right outside my little liberal oasis, able to afford being a professional blogger. I am happy in my home.

I've been living in Utah for three months, now, and I've only just connected these ideas--that I like Utah, and that right now sitting here on this plane, impatient and anxious, I feel like I am going home. I am slow, sometimes, just like a turtle. Just exactly like a turtle, just like this plane, I am getting there.