At 30, the longest I’ve ever lived somewhere is five years.
That’s one year longer than the time I spent in college, which for most people is probably the shortest time they’ve lived in one place. I’ve lived in 10 cities, seven states, and more houses than I feel like counting, and when people ask where I’m from, unlike when they ask me about the weather, there is depth to the question.
So much so that my answer varies depending on the person who’s asking.
I’ve moved all over, first for my dad’s job, then of my own accord
If I know I’ll never see you again, you get “Birmingham, Alabama,” my birthplace, quick and easy. If the conversation is casual, you get “all over the South,” which is technically true and also conversationally merciful.
But sometimes I’ll say, “It’s a long list, but I’m happy to share.” And if you say yes, I tell you to sit down before I walk through it all: Birmingham, then Nashville, then Dothan, then the Florida panhandle, then Louisville, then Denver, then Boulder for college, then Birmingham again, then New Orleans, and now Savannah, Georgia, where I’m three years into what is only a five-year stint, due to my husband’s career. After this, we’ll move somewhere else for one to three years, and then after that, maybe, we’ll settle down.
That answer is always followed by the next question: “Why did you move so often?” Like most kids, I knew my dad’s job only in the vaguest terms: real estate lawyer. What he actually does all day is still a mystery to me. I understood, in the general sense, that his career was built on helping businesses grow or closing them, Blockbuster among them. But when people asked, I’d just reply with, “My dad’s job, and, no, not military.” Quick and easy.
The first time I moved was when I was 3, and then again at 6. Our next move was when I was in fifth grade, and then twice in high school. I kept the pattern going myself when I moved to college, and then moved in with my grandfather after I graduated. I then followed my now husband to New Orleans, Louisiana, for his medical school training, and then to Savannah, Georgia, to begin his medical career.
Having wide roots has its pros and cons
I don’t have deep roots. I have wide ones. They spread laterally, under state lines and across regions, through rivers and streams, and over mountains, which is why it’s rare for me to meet someone without finding a thread between us. Being the perpetual new girl taught me to walk into any room feeling unafraid, but also to be slow to interrupt the existing flow.
Of course, wide roots can’t do everything deep ones can. I am nobody’s oldest friend. There is no one outside my family who has known me since before I knew myself, no neighbor who watched me learn to ride a bike and can hold that version of me up against the current one. Every friendship I have started in the middle of my story. When you move every few years, you get very good at beginnings and ends and very little practice at the middle.
I’ve often wondered which are more meaningful, wide roots or deep ones. But I think it’s hard to compare.
People ask if I’ve liked moving, and the honest answer is that I don’t know anything else. My birthday is on Christmas Day, and I get the same curiosity about whether I like that. But I’ve never had a birthday that wasn’t wrapped in the joy of a holiday, and I’ve never had a hometown that wasn’t temporary, whether I knew it at the time or not.
But I do know that the life I’ve lived has given me an education in the small, stubborn differences between places outsiders assume are identical. One Southern city says “y’all” while another, improbably, says “you guys.” Boiled peanuts are a religion in one town and a soggy nut in the next. Tiny things, sure, but it’s where a hometown keeps its personality, and learning to notice them and the bigger nuances has made me both more interested and, I hope, more interesting.
Sometimes I try to imagine what it would be like to have lived in just one city, in just one house, with the same friends from kindergarten through graduation. But I fear that version of me might be boring and close-minded, unexposed to different cultures, people, and places. I’d trade every deep root I don’t have before I’d trade the width of the ones I do.
So, have I liked moving? Yes, because it’s made me who I am.
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