Moving - Where We're From

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Moving

Where we came from
For nearly a decade, we were the envy of our friends and family, having purchased and lived in two brand new tract homes in the lovely suburbs of Northern California, just a stone's throw from the San Francisco Bay Area. It was the quintesential "American Dream": good schools, 24-hour grocerie stores every other mile, a Barns and Nobel bookstore almost within walking distance, shopping everywhere. Only it wasn't our dream.

In our dreams, I remembered the little ag town that we moved to in 1994. Peach orchards and hay fields in the middle of a town surrounded by acres and acres of sweet corn, tomatoes, strawberries, cherry trees, peaches, nectarines and apricots. From the 25 or more farm and fruit stand could be had local raspberries, honey, asparagus, onions and green beans in their season. A few hardy souls are still there, working the land. But through the years the orchards and fields in town have been replanted with cookie-cutter homes with no back yards; orchards on the edge of town have been felled for shopping centers and a new WinCo. The population has soared from a quiet 4,000 to over 40,000. They've built 2 new high schools in the last 5 years and were working on another one when we were leaving. For the first time, there is grafiti on the walls. The summer frogs and crickets are disappearing and their calls are now drowned out by police and ambulance sirens in the night.

Where we almost moved to
Shortly after the turn of the century, we purchased 5 lush, green acres in the gently rolling hills of central Tennesee. We would not move our high school kids there, but it was a stake in the ground and a statement to my husband and I that we would indeed someday leave the traffic and crowd of the suburbs for greenere pastures. We worked, we ate, we slept, we went to high school football games, changed the oil in the trucks, washed dishes - in short, continued on with our cushy suburban life - but in the back of our minds, in binders and computer files, we were slowly preparing for The Move. Vacations were spent flying East to TN, books on the flora and fauna of that beautiful state were bought from my favorite www.amazon.com. Websites on chickens were bookmarked and information on TN driver's licenses were gatherered. But that was years ago, and (as of March 2006) that property is now in escrow and soon to be someone else's dream.

Click to find out about being In Transit.

The American Dream
Suburbia USA, San Francisco Bay Area 2005.

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Summer 2005
Nearly every weekend during the summer of 2005, we packed up the truck with one more load of stuff to haul to NV and put into storage.