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1988
thirty years ago, my family moved from denton, tx, to a tiny rural town in the mountains of maryland. i remember being sad as we sold our things (we were packing everything into two old cars to drive north) and actually crying over the sale of our washing machine. transition does strange things to kids' emotions.

yet i remember arriving, excited, into this strange green mountainous place, and i remember even more anticipation as we found a home ("the old taylor place") and got ready for school to start at smithsburg elementary. third grade -- the same grade john starts this school year.

i remember meeting my first friend on a dusty dirt road - the "alley" that ran behind the high school tennis courts and athletic fields from our home just at the town's outskirts to her home just outside downtown. (if you've never known a small town downtown, that's probably hard to envision). it was an amazing place to be a child.

1998
ten years older, and i cannot get away quick enough. i have done well in school, excelled in music, run many (very slow) cross country races, driven many backroads with amazing friends, but before the ink is dry on my diploma i'm running. i'm done with this small town place and its small town people -- i am done being the all-american girl and the teacher's daughter. i'm ready to leap and never look back.

and so i do. and i don't. i'm gone.

2018
my family home is probably referred to as "mr. price's old place" now. after 30 years, the house has been sold and mr. price has moved back to his roots in louisiana. there haven't been price kids tearing up smithsburg's halls in over 15 years -- but now there's no price leading the orchestra either. it's the way of things, i guess. we all move on.

"home"
for most of the past 20 years, i've bristled anytime someone asked me when i was "coming home." my home has been in the dc area, or phoenix, or baton rouge, or, ironically enough, the dallas area again -- for 20 years now. i'm an adult, with a family, with a life, and i got out. that's not my home, anymore.

and if i am transparently honest, i've been kind of a jerk about it. i've taken great pride in that "getting out" -- that i was too big for that place to hold me, that i was going places and doing things that that place could never hold. sure, i have friends with happy lives there. but that's not me. it might be where i am from, but i got out. that's not home.

home
i wasn't totally wrong. frisco, tx, IS my home - where i have built a home and a life and a family. i've worked hard for this life and it's a beautiful one.

but there's such a thing as roots. such a thing as a place that holds the building blocks of who you are, and the people that witnessed you build from them.

there's such a thing as early morning coffee creekside in the mountains, as rainy walks and lunches downtown, as picnic lunches with that first old friend, as evening barbecue homecoming parties, as late night conversations and pretending you're far younger than you are -- all with people who have walked decades of life with you and love you despite the years where you were maybe a little high and mighty, maybe a little cocky, maybe a little too ready to leave them all behind.

but i am from these mountains and these people. and while my life is elsewhere, i'm ready to call it: being there, being with them, is and always will be going home.





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