there's nothing that the road cannot heal

Well, kids, this is the big news: I'm moving back to Pennsylvania.

I decided this past Monday, turned in my two-weeks' at work on Tuesday, and am now packing up and preparing for the trek home.

I can't wait. This will, according to my own plans (subject to change at God's divine plan, which appears to us transitory mortals as whim), be a temporary relocation, a familiar place with familiar people and my wonderful family, and something simultaneously old and new (great kind of change) while I get my feet back under me, recover from this past year of withering isolation, and map out plans for my future (which will, and must, include submissions of writing pieces for publication. Gotta happen).

Mom told me that the music leader at my parents' church lit up when she told him I was coming back. "Don't be surprised if he asks you to sing a few times at church," she said.

"Sweet!!" I said.

Now, whenever I hear this verse from "Moab," on Conor Oberst's latest album, I smile in delightful self-irony:

They say the sun won't burn forever
but that's a science too exact
I can prove it, watch we're crossing the state line
See those headlights coming toward us
that's someone going back
to a town they said they'd never --
yeah, they swore it on their life
But you can't break out of a circle
that you never knew you were in

There's nothing that the road cannot heal
There's nothing that the road cannot heal
Washed under the blacktop
Gone beneath my wheels
There's nothing that the road cannot heal

Bring on that open highway.