Moving

My wife and I have been talking about moving. We wouldn’t mind a larger house and maybe a nicer neighborhood. The question is where to move to? Most of our social life revolves around our friends and activities at church. But, we don’t want to move too far away from my work. After all I’m already a grump when I get home from a long day, we might need marriage counseling if you add in a long drive in traffic.

So the hunt begins for the perfect location. My wife would love to move to another part of Georgia or even another state. This surprises me because it is not uncommon in the south for multiple generations to live in the same area for decades. Seems some great great grandparent own some land and just kept dividing it up whenever the family grew larger. I feel sorry for whoever marries into those families, can you imagine living right next door to your in-laws? There goes any hope for privacy. So my wife thinks it would be exciting to start someplace fresh after living in the same area her whole life. I, however, have already experienced what it is like moving to another state. Yes, it is fun seeing new places and doing new stuff, but after awhile it all becomes routine. Plus you have to learn a new way of getting around. I don’t know how I ever survived without my GPS. Then you have to meet a new set of people and friends, and in today’s world coming across a friendly person is hard, unless you have something they want and they can borrow it from you a lot. But I was single when I moved to a different state, so it might be a little easier moving with a spouse. One less person to meet.

This makes me think of my parents. Born and bred in the Buckeye state. They did spend a stretch in Florida while dad was in the military. But, they pretty much haven’t lived any place else but the home of Zippy the Kangaroo, Akron, Ohio. I do not know how a kangaroo got to Akron maybe that will be for another blog. Anyways, my parents not only have lived in Akron for most of their adult life, but also their childhood as well. Plus they have lived on the same street to. They were not neighbors or anything; it was just one of those long major roads that runs through a city. They each grew up at different ends of this long street, got married and lived on another area of the street, the church they got married in was on this street. They had an opportunity to move someplace else when they retired, but what did they do? They built another house on the same street. Dad’s work was not far off this street and they do all their shopping on this street. You know that used car salesmen line, when he tells people that a car was only driven by an old lady just to go back and forth to the store. That’s my mom. She once had a car for about 10 years and only put like 60,000 mile on it. I just bought a jeep 3 years ago and already have about 75,000 on it. So not only have they not moved off the street, they apparently don’t travel very far up and down the street. So someday when they pass on, I might just have their grave site in another state, just so I can say they went somewhere.