When I was a kid I wanted to move so badly.  I wanted to be the new kid in a school so people would be interested in getting to know me.  Instead, I felt like the light fixture in the hallway that no one seems to really notice but just takes for granted that it’s there and will light up if you flip the switch.  I watched new kids come into my school that made being nervous look so interesting.  Their clothes were different, sometimes the way they talked was different, and usually their attitude on being new was different than what mine would have been.

 I think I took a fancy to being the new kid when I was six and my parents took me to see the movie Annie.  I wanted to be shipped away to the nearest orphanage immediately so I could start scrubbing floors and tending to the smaller kids when they had nightmares.  It might have been a hard knock life for the people in the movie, but they made it look so glamorous.  I don’t think I expected a big, bald billionaire to adopt me or anything; I think I just wanted a bit of excitement and change in my boring life.

 I asked my parents constantly if we could move.  I would lie in bed at night and dream of being the new kid.  I knew there were kids out that that moved constantly because of their parents’ jobs or because their folks were in the military.  I had cousins who got to move because their dad was an officer in the Navy.  They were always moving to exotic places like Japan and Texas.  I was stuck in Wisconsin, seemingly forever.  And worse than being stuck in Wisconsin, I felt trapped in the Marshfield public school system.

 Just as I was starting to give up my dream of moving away, my dad took a job in a city two hours from home.  Rather than move there though, he commuted.  He only worked the job Tuesdays through Thursdays so he would work at his own practice on Mondays and Fridays.  It didn’t seem like it was worth the move to my parents.  When my dad was offered more days at the job two hours from home, things started to look hopeful for me.  We started looking at houses in the new city and took a tour of the high school.  My brother and I were very up for the move but my sister was afraid of losing her boyfriend.  My mom was concerned about not being able to find a teaching job and my dad didn’t want to lose the freedom he had from my mom during the middle of the week.  He didn’t take the extra days in the new city and I ended up graduating high school from the same town that I started Kindergarten in.

 When I left for college, I never came back home and the constant moving began.  I spent spring break in my college town, and found a job as a camp consoler on the other side of the state.  I went from home to dorm room, from dorm room to a tiny cabin, from the tiny cabin back to a dorm room and then back to a tiny cabin and then finally to a tinderbox of an apartment that was nestled in on the top two stories of a house that looked creepily like the Amityville Horror House.  While in college I had to pack and repack my belongings a total of five times.

 When I felt that staying in state was too confining, I joined the Navy in hopes of going out and seeing the world.  I went from Illinois to Florida in a matter of months.  When I was asked where I wanted to go after I finished my Navy school, I requested Japan.  I was told that the Navy tried to get everyone’s wishes taken care of and so people were stationed as close to their original requests as possible.  The closest the Navy could put me to Japan was California.  Not San Diego or San Francisco but I was sent to a tiny land-locked base in the middle of nothing and everything.  I was three hours away from San Francisco and three hours from Los Angeles.  While I was in the Navy I had to pack and repack my belongings a total of eight times.  I went from one barracks to another, to yet another and another and another, then another barracks and then finally to an apartment and then to another apartment and then to a brand new duplex on my tiny little base.

 While I was in the Navy, I stupidly got married to the first guy who asked for my hand.  He was from Louisiana, which is how I ended up in the Deep South.  When we got out of the military we basically arm-wrestled each other to see where we would live our life after the Navy.  Since his upper body strength was quite a bit more than mine, he won.  He said he had a plan and since I was wearing the cheap gold band he gave me, I believed him.  “Oh, the place is great,” he told me.  “You’re gonna love it.”  Right.  We moved in with his parents.  Oh joy.  We were supposed to use their house as a stepping off point.  I figured we would be there for maybe two weeks or a month tops.  A year and a half later we finally packed up our crap and moved into a rickety old house that, thanks to the VA Loan we took out, we could call our own.  Home Sweet Shitty Home.  Shortly after we moved in that dump, we split up.  Now his second ex-wife has custody of that shitty, rickety house.  From that stack of sticks I moved to an apartment and then to a brand new house of my very own.  That house got repossessed because I lost my job due to cut backs so I moved across state to be with my then-boyfriend-now-husband.  That house got squished by Hurricane Gustov, which landed us in a hotel for a month and then to a rent house for two years.  From the rent house we moved into the house we’re in now.  It’s our forever home.  I hope.  Since I’ve been in Louisiana, I’ve moved a total of seven times.  I’m tired.  I’m done.  I need permanence. 

 The other day my husband commented on how many cardboard boxes we have.  I almost, but not quite, hoard boxes just in case.  Just in case we move.  Again.  Our storeroom was filled with empty and half-full (or half-empty) boxes.  He said it was time to get rid of them.  Slowly I started collapsing them thinking, “Doesn’t he know how hard it is to scrounge up a good box at the grocery stores these days?  And aren’t I the clever one for buying five large, plastic totes for this move?”  But the more I collapsed, the better I felt.  Each box I broke down brought me a step closer to feeling more permanent in my new house.  Finally after months of living here, I finally feel at home.  I’m home.  I’m home!

 Before when I would get sad or lonely, my sob story mantra would be, “I want to go home, I just want to go home!”  I’d wail this in my head and sometimes out loud.  It’s gone now.  I am home.  Finally I am where I’m supposed to be.

 After an entire childhood of wanting to move I think I’ve done it enough.  I brought my childhood dream to fruition to the extreme.  My mom has an old address book filled to the gills with just my old addresses.  Throw it away, Mom.  I’m home.