I Am The Wanderer
I get around.
Recently, I realized that I'm a wanderer.
I'm not a traveler. I don't often plan trips to new places.
I'm a wanderer. I'm always comfortable with the idea of being somewhere else.
I moved out of my childhood home in 1985. Three years later, I left Birmingham, Alabama, where I was born and raised, and never moved back.
In the first 16 years after I left my parent's house, I changed cities five times, moving about every three years. I can't remember how many times I changed domiciles over that period, but given that I was in my 20s, it was probably too many.
One could say that my moving around was a function of youth more than an intrinsic lifelong wanderlust, except that the moving didn't stop when my wife, child, and I moved to the Washington DC suburbs nearly 21 years ago. We kept moving.
Now my wandering nature is becoming clear to me as we prepare to move to Tennessee.
For the last 20 years, and until last summer, I always thought I’d eventually move back to Austin, or at least Central Texas. Hell, I’ve never really liked living in the DC area and would have moved back any time if the opportunity had presented itself. But as soon as my wife suggested that the southern Appalachians might be nice, my immediate reaction was, “Let’s do that!”
This is not the first time I've changed my destination on a dime. In early 1988, a good friend and I decided to move to Boulder, Colorado. But as the year wore on, my friend hemmed and hawed, always positive about our plan but never seeming actually to have the time to make a plan.
So, when a roommate returned from a fall trip to Austin, called it a haven for cool weirdos like us, and declared that he was moving there at his earliest opportunity, my immediate reaction was, “Can I come?”
We were there before New Year’s.
Even as we plan this move, I have little commitment to any specific place. We chose Knoxville not for some particular value we found there (though there is much to love) but because it’s in the geographic center of the larger area we considered, roughly Nashville to Asheville, North Carolina. Other factors, known and unknown, could change that – at least until my signature is on a lease and the deposit has cleared.
We do plan to rent at first, of course. There’s no way I’d commit to a mortgage without test-driving the state. But just the other day, my wife, a real estate agent and so handling this part of the transition, told me that finding a rental house meeting her elderly mother's needs, our pets' requirements, and the features we all want “may require us to expand our search area.” “Okay,” I said.
I'm a wanderer. I'll go wherever.
Since we'll be renting, there will be another move in a few years. This is not an unusual experience for us. In the 21 years we’ve lived in the DC suburbs, we've resided in five different houses. We’ve moved on average once every four years (not that much different from the “every three years” of the 1990s).
Over these 20-plus years, however, no one else we know has moved that much. Some of our closest friends have lived in the same house the entire time – they already lived there when we met them in 2002. Moving every few years is decidedly uncommon among our peer group.
A few years ago, a young family bought the house next door. They're lovely people who moved out of the city into what they call their “forever home” in the suburbs. Although I understand the phrase, I can’t imagine how “a forever home” would feel. I’ve never considered any house “forever.”
I imagine the next house we buy will be our last home, so, in essence, a “forever home.” But I can't be sure. Either way, I don't know that we’ll stop wandering. We dream of an RV and joke about being camp hosts and spending every summer in a different park. There’s always somewhere else we could be.
We'll see.
Whatever comes, after nearly 40 years, I'm at peace with my wandering.