Well, at least no one can say that Jody and I were boring in the first half of the 2020s.
All that to say: I recently moved to Wisconsin. [Pause for predictable reactions.] And, Jody will join me here soon. We anticipated the jokes about our pinball-machine behavior over the past few years,1 but in all candor, a certain Rhett Butler quote comes to mind. It has been a bumpy road that led to Wisconsin, but it is our road and only our road, and we are grateful for the ride as well as its destination.
Six states now. Six! Six DMV visits. Six license plates, and no, we’re not aiming for the complete set.
You won’t believe me, but as a general rule I believe that staying put should be the default life position. Chasing greener grass is a fool’s game. (Although, full disclosure: I have found that the grass in Wisconsin actually is greener than the grass in Southern California (but that’s beside the point).) Chasing excitement and/or fleeing boredom is not the way to live in my opinion, but sometimes . . . some-times . . . there may come a time to move on.2 I cannot say when that might be for anyone else, if ever, but I can say that if the call ever becomes clear, my experience is that it is worth listening.
For dramatic example, I am currently reading Isabel Wilkerson’s beautiful and important book, The Warmth of Other Suns, a masterful chronicling of “The Great Migration” of Black American citizens to the North and West from the Jim Crow South between 1915-1970.3 I am astounded both by the relentless instances of racial terror that led to the diaspora and the incredible courage required to undertake the harrowing journey.4 Your possible journey to some version of freedom (and mine) will be ridiculously less challenging, less dramatic, and less heroic than the stories Wilkerson shares of other journeys that led human beings, for instance, from Arkansas to Wisconsin, but their stories display in unforgettable fashion that human beings can pursue freedom in even the most terrible of circumstances.
Our journey is not book-worthy, but it is incredibly special to us. I love my Arkansas roots, but if you became a part of our life story in Mississippi, or California, or Tennessee, or Illinois, or California (again) — and you know who you are — then each move was more than worth it for us. I know I speak for Jody when I say that our lives are incomplete and unimaginable without you in it.
So you can laugh at us for moving again all you want, because we know what awaits us here in Wisconsin before it even happens: More special people. Plus, this time, in private and personal ways, our own unique type of freedom.
Stay tuned if you are at all interested as I resume my blogging habit, and I will be sure to narrate as our life unfolds in this new and beautiful part of the country.
And Good Lord, if I might put in (another) request, may whatever years we have left see far more planting and much less uprooting.
- Yes, I am eating the words that I posted less than a year ago, “Moving ever again sounds like a terrible idea.” ↩︎
- Ecclesiastes 3: 1-2. ↩︎
- Nearly six million human beings made the journey. ↩︎
- Wilkerson shares the story of Arrington High, a native of Mississippi who was imprisoned in an insane asylum in the 1950s for speaking against injustice, helped to escape and cross the state line into Alabama, and then nailed into a coffin and shipped on a train to Chicago. ↩︎
As I rise each morning and retire at night, an unread book sits peacefully on the nightstand, white letters on a bright blue screaming its title in all caps: NECESSARY ENDINGS. My new friend Matt shared it with me, and I only have a general idea of what it has to teach me, but it sure seems appropriate.
“Life is all memory except for the one present moment that goes by so quick you can hardly catch it going.” – Tennessee Williams, The Milk Train Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore
Starting to Look Up 