My husband and I are planning to move to Florida within the next few months. It will be our sixth move since we started living together.
Yes. Sixth move!
We have done this song and dance five other times already. A majority of the moves were voluntary, with one of the latest being involuntary after getting laid off.
I decided to reflect back at each location, starting with the first of them all.
Growing Up in Minnesota
My time growing up and then living as an independent adult in Minnesota left me with two vastly different experiences. I will get into those details in a future post. In this post, I want to reflect back on my time growing up.
Including my time during and after college, I lived in the same home with my parents for 23 years. We resided in a small town on a small plot of land in the country. We didn't have a farm, but we had several acres to explore.
We were working class and always had enough money to survive. We didn't have cable TV or new cars, and we didn't take vacations like other families did. We grew a lot of our own food, and our family gatherings usually took place behind our shed by the bonfire pit.
We didn't come from power or wealth. In small towns, people look for familiar last names. If you came from the right last name, you were going to go far socially. Ours was one of those generic last names. You heard it, assumed it was from one family, but it was from another. Long story short, people stopped caring about my last name and just let me fall into the woodwork.
School
My graduating class had around 80 students total. We were the largest class in our 7th - 12th grade school, with the latest batch of 7th graders totaling just under 50 students. We were a Title I school and often suffered from lack of funds for most activities.
People stuck to their groups, just like they would in schools much larger. Many of classmates would lie by claiming there were no cliques in our class. The cliques existed, but the students with the last names of power had the biggest and best clique of them all. While the rest of us struggled for our grades and achievements, they were held in highest regard with little to no work put forth on their behalf.
I can't express complete bitterness towards it all. I accepted that I had to work much harder than everyone else, and I tried to do so with a smile on my face. It paid off, since I was voted 'Most Optimistic' during my senior year.
Activities
When I first started high school, the theater department struck my interest after watching upper classmen perform classics like Fiddler on the Roof and The Music Man. The end of my ninth grade year, after my band teacher told me he had great plans for me and my talents, we found out that he and our choir teacher were moving on.
Around that time, the money ran dry for our arts department. Instead of spending my last three years of high school participating in culturally rich activities, we were left with one over-worked band/choir director who only did the bare minimum. We were also left performing budget plays found in the back of the theater catalog.
I still desired to have that creative outlet, and continued to participate in mediocre productions of unknown scripts to be performed for less than fifty audience members.
Social Life
My town had less than 600 people. There were more barns than business establishments. The closest hang-out town was 30 minutes away. Activities to participate in locally were to die from boredom, drink to excess, or have unprotected sex.
I had a core group of friends that went against the standard. If we weren't up for hanging out in someone's basement watching movies, we would drive the 30 minutes to grab a bite to eat or sneak snacks into the movie theater. When the local music festival was in town, we set up our lawn chairs in the Wal-Mart parking lot to socialize with festival attendance who were camping there for the night.
Why Did I Leave?
My existence in that small town was merely satirical. There was something comedic about a creative girl who wears skirts over her jeans in a town filled with old-way farmers. When I moved back home after college, I struggled to find a job because people simply couldn't see anything but a little 15-year-old version of me. They meant well, but no one was taking me seriously.
I knew I wanted to explore the world and see everything I could. I wanted to fly in a plane and go see what was on the other side of the ocean. No one really shared my passion. Those who shared my passion had moved on and lived elsewhere.
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