Writing Myself West: A Tale of Thanksgiving

This Thanksgiving, wowza, am I thankful.

After 17 years of semi-subletting a one-bedroom Brooklyn apartment, my dog and I moved, sight unseen, to a 1970s ranch house with three single guy housemates. The house is located off a major highway, five miles outside a Rocky Mountain town.

It's heaven.

Uprooting my life was not part of my to-do list for the end of this year. In fact, I was just starting to get back to something resembling normalcy.

For the last five years, I'd been in professional love, writing a novel that mixed history with comic romance. I had finished the manuscript and sent it off to prospective agents. But now that my schedule was now open for all kinds of NY derring-do, I realized, to my surprise, that my emotional lease on the city had expired.

One of my new friends in my new town is the author a series of kids' books called "Change is Strange." As I prepared to head West, I knew that change could wreak havoc on adults, too. The High-Stress List of Big Life Moments went: marriage, divorce, moving and death, the experts said. If you'd been through one, you knew enough to dread the others.

The good news was, I'd never been married, or divorced - or dead. There was no cause for negativity.

Life is short, and so I am! I told the dog, as I pulled my suitcase from dusty upper shelves of the hall closet from atop our stepladder.

Life is short, and America is big!

Two non-renewed leases, six weeks and one Dramamine'd-dog-on-plane later, I traded in my What If's on an island of crowded millions for Why Nots? in a mountain town of spaced-out 100,000s.

By that, I mean spaced-out in a good way. As in mentally and physically spacious.

My thirty-something housemate is an independent circus artist who keeps an aerial practice wire in the meadow. My twenty-something housemate drives a semi on oil fields for two weeks at a time. In his free time, he break-dances and sculpts. (Both guys are single, adorable, kind and looking for Ms. Right, FYI.)

The other night I came home from a fiddle lesson to find my next-door neighbors juggling fire in our shared driveway under a dazzling, dotted canopy of stars.

A schnook, out West, is no longer a synonym for schmuck. It's a warm, mountain-born wind (spelled Chinook). Activism blooms here, with an emphasis on active. Candidates for national office opine, in person, in neighbors' living rooms. Hunters and hikers worship their respective trails.

The land is huge here. And yet you can't get lost, thanks to the mountains.

"The Rockies run North and South along the West," my housemates reassured me on my first day as a Rock-ette as I hopped into my rent-a-car for a jaunt into town. Then they smiled. As if geography was a natural thing.

A few minutes later, I found myself on the right hand lane of an eight-lane highway, trying to turn left.

North and south, in my mind, were still the Empire State Building and Brooklyn Bridge. West was the Hudson. As I pondered my next move, the light mercifully turned red.

Back in New York, I'd collected soubriquets. Among them: "optimist."

Before I left town, I'd helped a professional psychic connect with some folks in TV production. She, in gratitude, offered to do a phone session with me from her car in LA.

My question had to do with the best agent for my book. Was it a certain New York woman I'd just queried?

My agent was a man on the West coast, the psychic told me. She saw me living out West, too. How odd!

I told her about my Rocky Mountain move-on-tap.

"Hmm!" the psychic said. It's hard to hear a smile, I know. But her voice sounded smiley. "On the romantic front, do you know the guy who's waiting for you in your new town?" the psychic said. "Because he's there."

Three weeks later, I was stuck in Rocky Mountainous traffic, wondering how to make a right turn go left, when a driver in a station wagon waved me into his left-ward lane. There was plenty of room, his smile implied.

That's when I saw the mountains. They were tall and sunlit and undeniable. I moved West. The light turned green.

This Thanksgiving, I will be eating with new friends. I am grateful for them, and to be living in a place where happiness feels spacious and possible.

Yesterday, a male agent emailed from the West.

I am grateful for the psychic, and for the agent, and the book that literally carried me away.

As for the guy who's waiting for me here, romantically? Each day, I wave people into my lane. That's more about thanks than romance, of course.

Still, I feel as if after years of fiction, I'm making space.

Color me optimistic. I'll keep you posted.

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