The following is the opinion and analysis of the writer:
Itâs time.
Thatâs my refrain these days.
Itâs time for me to move back to St. Louis, where I grew up and where my parents, brother and his family still live. My last day as the Starâs Opinion editor will be Oct. 15.
Iâm ready for a new chapter, in a familiar book.
I moved to Tucson in 1990 to attend the University of Arizona. I stayed, built a full life. Iâve spent 25 years â very nearly half of my time on the planet â working at the Arizona Daily Star, serving the community that so kindly welcomed me.
Something shifted when I visited to St. Louis in April, the first time in two years. For the past 30 years Iâd go a couple times a year, but this time felt, well, different. Unsettled. My internal compass kept swinging, unsure where to point.
When I feel uncertain, I turn to the natural world. Ants always seem to know what theyâre doing, donât they? Thereâs comfort in that. How does a salmon know itâs time to swim upstream to where its life began? How do birds and butterflies feel when they take flight to return to familiar trees?
Then, as I drove the rental car past my high school, mulling over my three years at the school newspaper and how I was an opinion editor then and Iâm an opinion editor now, it clicked: Iâm the salmon.
I began to let in a vague idea that yes, maybe I would return to St. Louis. It made sense, in the future tense.
But as Iâve learned since being widowed the day after Thanksgiving in 2019 and from living through this pandemic, waiting for the future is folly.
My talk of a future move grew into knowledge in the present. Itâs time.
There are logistics. The last time I job hunted the internet as we know it hadnât been born. St. Louis humidity isnât limited to a two- or three-week period of suffocatingly hot dampness you endure because it means monsoon rains have arrived. Thereâs snow, the kind that sticks and needs shoveling. And tornadoes.
But there are also lightning bugs, rivers with water and possibilities.
Iâve been thinking about how we journalists time travel. We report whatâs happening now, or what is expected to happen, and by the time we share our work, even minutes later, itâs the past. Iâm in that liminal space between story completion and publication, between knowing my new chapter is coming and turning the page.
So here I sit, writing and revising my final column for the Arizona Daily Star in an apartment peppered with plastic bins, ready for the movers, waiting for departure day to arrive. I donât know whatâs next.
When I arrived in Tucson in August 1990 for college, I didnât know what was ahead. Iâd visited the summer before on a church youth group work trip, spending a couple days here before heading to Mexico. I fell in love.
I returned to look for that love and I found it in abundance. I found it in the desert and the mountains, in the students I taught at the University of Arizona, in readers who embraced me and those who might be glad Iâm leaving. I found that love in how Tucsonans race outside at the first tinkling of rain and how 60 degrees is cold.
I found love watching an adorable creature in the desert arrange its nest, only to learn later that it was a packrat. I found love in red chile and pan dulce, in trees with green trunks and the battleship-sized beetles they attract.
I found it in important but interminable school board and local government meetings. Love appeared in the trust Tucsonans showed in their flood of letters to the editor and in the work and friendship of talented, funny colleagues.
I found love in Tucson. I hope Iâll find it again in St. Louis.
Thank you.
