Home sweet home
It’s been seven years since we put everything we owned in a U-Haul truck and left Louisville, Kentucky in the rear view mirror. When we left it seemed like we’d been there for a long time; we’d moved there eight months after our wedding so it was really the only place we’d called home as a married couple.
I was raised outside of Nashville but spent a lot of my summers in Northwest Alabama with family, so when we decided to move to Hartselle, the town where my wife was raised, it felt like I was moving home too.
I’m not sure what I thought living in Alabama would feel like, but I imagined it’d be like when the Israelites crossed over into the Promised Land.
Not that this is the land of milk and honey, but it’s the place I’d longed for since I was a child.
Whatever I expected, it never came to fruition; nothing magical happened when we unloaded that U-Haul that made me feel like I’d finally found home. It was exciting because it was new, but it wasn’t as fulfilling as I thought it’d be.
Over time I’ve found that the thing I was searching for wasn’t a place; it was a feeling. It was spending time with family and breaking bread over cherished memories. I didn’t long for Alabama because of anything about the state that made it special; I longed to be near my people there.
It’d be easy to be disappointed that the move didn’t live up to expectations, but I’ve found peace in knowing that home is where your story is built. We may never live there again, but there will always be a part of Louisville and Nashville that are home to us. We move through life and our memories leave little pieces of us as we go; like a box of childhood Knick-knacks in your parents house, each place has small reminders of the life we lived there.
This place feels like home now, not because of coordinates on a map, but because we’ve made memories here that will linger until the end of time.
