Moving...A Major Life Change At Any Age

I have moved many times in my life-- you know, the kind of moves where you ask a few friends to pitch in to help you move your meager belongings across town. The friends supply the truck and muscle; you provide the beer and hotdogs.

In the second decade of my life, I moved so frequently that after a bit, I didn't even unpack any longer.

Those moves weren't really traumatic. I moved from one part of town to another and back again, which didn't necessitate leaving behind friends or family or familiar routines. Frankly, I didn't really see how moving was considered to be such a major life change. It was more like a shuffling of my stuff and me.

But wait! Believe me, it is a law of life, as yet unnamed, that anything at which you scoff will come back later in life to bite you in the butt. And so my current story begins:

When an opportunity to move to a small Western town came my way, my sense of adventure kicked into overdrive and I said "yes." Agreeing to move was the easiest part of the whole experience, as it turns out.

When a person moves more than fifteen hundred miles, there are no friends lining up to help that person, beer or no beer. Fifteen hundred miles also represents a distance not conducive to Sunday drives to see the family or plan get-togethers with old friends on the spur of the moment.

A distance of fifteen hundred miles means you need to hire a mover or else haul the stuff yourself in one of those rented trucks. Never one who has been fond of driving someone else's vehicle, I settled on hiring a professional mover. If I were a younger woman, the company may just have asked me for my first-born child as payment, instead, they are settling for the proverbial body parts. This could make packing dicey, but payment isn't needed until time of delivery-- thank goodness!

Moving a distance of fifteen hundred miles has made me look at "home" a lot closer. It is as if I am looking at scenes and settings with new eyes; after almost fifty years, I am seeing things I have never noticed before. These new details endear my current home even more to me than before, and a sense of homesickness has set in before I've even driven out of town.

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