One week ago, I moved away from the town where I was born, and raised, and where I have lived my entire adult life. It is the first time I have ever packed up all of my belongings and moved away from home without some sort of loosely designed “plan B” for moving back home. The first time I moved away, it was for college - and I never really planned on doing anything other than finding work back at home after college. The second time I moved, I followed a guy I was dating about three hours west of home. That lasted a few weeks until just after I called my brother to find out whether he would scrap his weekend plans and come visit me in an empty moving truck.
Even though the majority of my friends and family have taken flight at some point to go and live in other parts of the state, country and world, I was content to make road trips or plan vacations to visit them while I stayed planted firmly in the town where I was born. However, over the years, it became more and more apparent that my home town would always lack something I truly longed for: mountains. And now, due to the quest for steady work, my home town also lacks something of even greater importance to me: my husband. Fortunately, there was a solution that included both mountains and my husband (which are not listed in order of importance in this story. I'm just sayin.) Having found work in his field in the great wilderness of the Chattahoochee National Forest, we now get to call North Georgia our home.
The culture of North Georgia is right up my alley. Hiking, camping, river recreation and acoustic music are the types of activities to which my husband and I naturally gravitate, and these activities are found in wild abandon here. With tourism being the predominant source of income for these mountain towns, the town squares and historic downtown areas are all beautifully kept and designed to entice people into their storefronts and restaurants. We settled on Dahlonega, a small town with a college, a dearth of good restaurants, and plenty of outdoor recreation outfitters.
When I tell people in Dahlonega’s shops and restaurants that I have just moved to their town, they are really nice. In fact, they light up. I don’t know if it is Hollywood or my own experience in some of Virginia’s small towns that made me want to duck right after saying I was new in town, but I was genuinely surprised by the sheer enthusiasm of some of the welcomes. Anyone from a small town or who has moved to a small town or had a loved one move to a small town knows that in SOME of those small towns, the people who call themselves locals can be extremely possessive over their local status and horribly suspicious of newcomers. People laugh, but deep down we all know that it can take years, generations even, for a town to stop thinking of transplants as foreigners! Everyone knows someone who still refers to the grandchildren of a man who moved down south in 1942 as “those northerners across the street.”
But not here! Here they just start telling you where to get the best plate of food, and who to call for this or that or something or other. I was even given a code word to use so the local businesses would know that I was local and then give me the local discount. So, while I am a foreigner in a new land, I have been delighted by the locals who gave me a warm welcome and a ready smile this first week. Now I just have to wait and see if the joke is on me, and whether the store owners all put another notch in their cash drawers when I walk in and announce “I am a nugget!” and expect some sort of discount for it.
For those of you who don’t know, my other half has been working in Tennessee since the beginning of the year and we have had a long distance marriage. We both essentially learned to live alone again, and visits took on the sheen of mini-vacations from our newly established solo routines. So, in addition to both of us adjusting to a new town and new job circumstances, we are learning how to integrate our lives again under a single roof. I’m pretty sure my husband had forgotten just how much I love to talk. To him. About. Everything. This is just a mini-glimpse of what happens to couples who’ve had their own daily routines for forty years and suddenly decide to experience the joys of retirement together. Ahh, what fun is marriage if you can’t occasionally chatter your husband to a slow, tortuous death?
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