Well, in a weird and somewhat superfluous twist of fate, Emil has interviewed for a job in Ann Arbor, approximately a mile and a half from our (Ann Arbor) house - actually it's closer than his old job was. How weird is that?

** INTERRUPTION **
-- ooh! Oooh! I'm listening to CBC and on the arts report, they're talking about Sylvia Plath (since a newly-discovered poem of hers has just been published), and they quoted "biographer Linda Wagner-Martin"! Ooh, ooh! In addition to being widely known as Sylvia Plath's biographer, Linda W-M also directed my dissertation. Ooh! Zero degrees of separation!
** END INTERRUPTION **

Anyhow. So. We have the prospect of possibly being able to move back to Ann Arbor if we want . . . a possibility only occasioned because we now seem to own two houses, and when you have two houses and can't seem to get rid of one, your thinking starts to get a little wacky. There are so-oo many possibilities . . . For instance, we could keep the Lansing house and while the kids are going to LCC, they (and I) could stay here for a few days during the week, and I'm thinking (although I don't really know for sure) that we could possibly get a nice tax write-off for that . . . Or we could perhaps rent this house at a huge loss to a colleague (now commuting from his in-laws' house in Grand Rapids because he can't sell his house in suburan Chicago) and also reap tax benefits. Being absentee landlords for this house seems better than being absentee landlords for the A2 house because I have to come here several times a week, most of the year. And, too, I haven't bonded to this house as much yet.

Some of us (like, Emma) are extremely clear about what we should do; she's chomping at the bit to go back. (Why on earth Emil ever told her about the interview is totally beyond me . . . she is, in fact, going to be extremely disappointed if we don't go.)

I, myself, am more ambivalent. I really miss Ann Arbor, I won't lie . . . but, having moved several times in my lifetime, I also know this is normal. (Or maybe not. When we moved to Ann Arbor from Erie, I don't think I even spent a nanosecond missing Erie. I would think, "Gee, I miss the lake," but there were so many other compensations that missing the lake was trivial.) It's a wonderful thing to be two miles from work, there's no doubt; and in general, I appreciate the fact that everything is so close by. (To wit: On Monday we scheduled Em's tonsilectomy. We had a choice of having it done by our doctor at either hospital. I told Emil that since our experience at Sparrow, aside from the wait in the ER, was really good, we should go there since it's only a mile away; no sense going the three miles to Ingham Medical . . . )

And yet, this is a peculiar place because there's no here here. There's no city center anywhere that's vibrant and interesting; downtown Lansing shuts up nearly tight as a drum at 5 or 6 pm, and East Lansing is the province of 18- to 21-year-olds. After about ten o'clock at night, the place is crawling with drunk college students on their way to or from the bar; grownups really don't go there. (I was trying to explain to my friend Bruce the other day that at midnight in Ann Arbor, you're as likely to see a 60-year-old on the downtown streets as you are an undergrad.)

Everything's arranged on a line, essentially, that stretches the seven or so miles from Lansing to Haslett. But it seems longer. For instance, it's 6.9 miles from our house to Louise's house, but I haven't seen her much more than I would have if we were still in A2. And I know I haven't seen my friend Jeff any more frequently . . . which is another point. I'm not socializing with my colleagues (which is really okay; I'm not sure I want to, and I was worried about negotiating social distance when we got here). But the upshot is that I'm not really socializing with anyone, and I almost don't know how to start. Part of that is because it's the middle of the semester and nobody who teaches has time to make new connections at this time of year . . . but come summer, my colleagues scatter to the four winds. I do realize that this is just one of those things you have to figure out if you move from one place to another, and not necessarily a permanent situation, but it does give me pause.

And some things have not turned out to be as good as I expected. The bike ride to work, for instance, is less do-able than the ride to Pharmacy was, even though it's approximately the same length. One factor is the crack houses on Shiawassee (OK, only one that I know of - and I did get a student paper about that one so I'm fairly sure it is or was there), which kinda put a pall on after-dark commuting (sometimes a factor. Like today; I'm going to be coming home from German class at 8 pm). And then there's the wind. The weather truly is different here, and it's worse. You wouldn't know it if you just checked the weather channel website and compared temperatures and such, but there seems to be more wind here and also more precipitation. (And a heckuva lot more mosquitoes.) I'm wondering how feasible it really will be to ride to work in the winter, and have already decided that I can't straightjacket myself into riding (even though I made such a big deal of it) if it turns out not to be pleasant. At the moment, though, I am straightjacketed by the fact that Emma and I are sharing a car, which, with her current schedule, means I have to ride my bike a few days a week. That will change next semester (since I have three online classes), but it's a factor now, and something to be considered in the future.

And that's not even mentioning the summer. In Ann Arbor I can go for a 15-mile bike ride more or less without hitting any traffic because I go a mile through residential neighborhoods to Gallup Park and trails that run along the Huron River. (And the Huron River. *sigh* It's gorgeous. The sun setting over the river, as seen from Gallup Park, is genuinely pretty, not squint-and-forget-it's-mid-Michigan pretty.) And there's still the whole swimming thing . . . I know I can swim here at MSU; I've been there. And I know I prefer Fuller Pool (which I can also reach by bike without messing around on busy streets). Given my druthers, I'd rather swim in a place that caters to the whole community, rather than a college pool. I like seeing bunches of little kids, and occasionally going down the water slide, and nodding to the same group of middle-aged (and beyond) people who come every summer . . . As I was mentioning to Emil before he knew he got the interview, there may be compensations I don't see right now, but I'm skeptical: I've been here, done this . . . I know there's nothing like the Summer Festival, for instance. Well, yes, there is, sort of: I could drive into downtown EL and see kids' films at night once a week in Valley Court Park . . . but puh-leeze. Compare that with riding my bike down, meeting up with friends to have a beer and listen to music, and then watching a film (on an inflatable screen in front of Rackham, one of the prettiest buildings in the city . . . )

Of course, Ann Arbor means lots more traffic, a long drive for me again, a higher cost of living (especially food), and living in a house that neither Emil nor I like as well as the one we have here. This house is eminently livable, whereas by contrast, the space in the Ann Arbor house seems chopped up and isolating. The living room was never very cosy, and we ended up spending most of our time on different floors; Emil would compute or watch tv in the basement, and I'd be upstairs in the alcove off our bedroom. And truth to tell, I wasn't very happy during the years when we lived in that house, all things considered. I do wonder how much the physical space contributed to that . . . although realistically, perhaps the fact(s) that I was coping with having been denied tenure, and with problems with Charlie, and with other stuff had a lot more to do with my happiness than the layout of the house . . . (The neighborhood is another matter. I like this one all right, but I definitely prefer the other, with its stately houses - not ours, but others nearby -, winding streets, and proximity to Morgan and York, the Produce Station, Caribou Coffee, the recycle place, Dairy Queen, Kroger's . . . all of which are within a mile . . . )

And then, too, if we were able to sell this house, we'd likely get nearly what we paid for it (prices are still falling here, so that's just specualtion), which would mean that we'd get our down payment back . . . this house has seemed a lot more expensive considering that I now know in my gut that real estate prices can indeed fall (it sounds stupid not to have known that, but it's never happened since I've been buying and selling houses). I think about that money from time to time, and if I add it on to the cost of moving in general (which was much more costly than I'd remembered), this move seems very expensive indeed. That money could be sitting in a bank account, chugging along and making more money while we sleep, but no . . . instead, it's being whittled away by the deflating housing bubble. (What a colossally bad financial decision this was. Ouch.) (I know you have to pay to live somewhere, but we had somewhere to live.)

All in all, if it were strictly up to me, I think I'd go back. And if I were in Emil's shoes, I'd definitely want to go back - he would never have to explain to the people he works with (like, including the wife of our real estate agent) why he moved here and then moved back in short order, which is one of the things that gives me pause.

Of course, he's also got the jobs to consider. In terms of money and benefits and such, the Ann Arbor job sounds a bit better to me. (He's a contractor now, so he doesn't get vacation time or paid holidays or employer contributions to his retirement fund or sick days . . . ) But in terms of the actual work, he's leaning towards the one he has now because it's very low-stress and the other one might involve more stress and more responsibility (and possibly more fun, I think . . . but then, I'm not him). But he's not insensible to the fact that driving two hours a day in the winter might add a little stress . . . But then again, he's a lot more comfortable here than I am. Lansing is a lot like Youngstown in many ways, and he likes the familiarity. And although I can imagine a future in which I get to live part of the time here and part of the time there, he would have no such options. If we moved back, he would live in Ann Arbor all the time.

So there it is. I wonder what happens if we move back and then in two months he sees a wonderful job just a mile from this house . . . :) (We should probably just, um, stay the course, but those sound like dirty words these days . . . )