Wagon Wheel
We’ve been in California for 4 years this month.
We came to the west coast chasing a dream, excited but scared to be so far from everything we knew so well back east, and while it was so good in so many ways, I was ready to to get back to Charlotte almost as soon as the movers showed up with our stuff in August of 2016.
We unpacked, and we settled in, and we found the Chinese place down the street that we would order from for Friday night dinners on the couch watching Game of Thrones. I walked Ender down tight sidewalks lined with lemon and avocado trees, big palm leaves always on the horizon.
Rob worked harder than he’s ever worked before. I wrote five cookbooks and started teaching barre in Palo Alto. We got pregnant and moved across the bay for a little more space. We had a baby and friends came to visit and that baby made time speed up faster than I ever thought possible as we delighted in every single little and not-so-little milestone. Priorities shifted, and we all grew.
We missed people more than we knew we could. We flew back to Charlotte or Virginia twice a year and saw our people as much as we could. We dreamed about one day looking back at our time in California for the beautiful almost half decade that it was, hopefully from the comfort of a place that truly felt like home again.
And now that day has come—we’re trading our bay views and bridges for muggy summers and mosquitoes, for biscuits and barbecue and the changing leaves of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
It’s bittersweet for sure, because as homesick as we were most of the time, we really did love our time in California. It was never going to be a permanent home for us, but we’ve lived here longer than any other place since college. For a while, it really did become home. But now it’s time to go.
“Heading down south to the land of the pines
I’m thumbing my way into North Caroline
Staring up the road and pray to God I see headlights
I made it down the coast in seventeen hours
Picking me a bouquet of dogwood flowers
And I’m a-hopin’ for Raleigh, I can see my baby tonight”
