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Last year I moved back to my hometown after living elsewhere for 16 years. I knew that it would feel different from when I left. My parents still live in my hometown, so I had been back to visit regularly for short stretches of time. When my family decided to move, we anticipated what we would love about the new-to-us (familiar to me) place: warmer weather, less crowded roads, great public schools, excellent work opportunities, easy access to family. We also recognized the downsides: lackluster restaurants, no mountains or four seasons, and most significantly, uprooting our community ties and starting over.
Starting over is always hard, but it is especially hard in your mid-thirties. My husband Dan has had lots of practice. He was a military brat and moved a half dozen times in his childhood. Early in our marriage, we moved so often we ran out of previous address lines when filling out background checks. There is much to commend moving to new places. I believe that we grew in ways we would not have otherwise. We experienced new ways of doing things, new types of “normal” for different areas. We had to put ourselves out there to get to know people. We learned loads about home maintenance since we lived in houses built in various decades.
Yet those starting fresh adventures also meant that we never really felt settled. We never had time to let any place become too familiar. We never just so happened to run into friends during a trip to Target. We remained relatively anonymous. Some of this was due in part to the fact that we lived in some big cities. But we did not stay anywhere long enough to build those deep community ties. That is, until our last place, Charlottesville.
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