We will never forget making those calls in early November of last year. We were calling our closest friends and even our family to tell them of the big move we were about to make. We knew for a few years we wanted to eventually move to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and we knew for months we had narrowed it down to a specific area, but we hadn’t really shared that. At the time, we didn’t know we had anything to share.
When we visited the area again last October, and we found our dream home, we went back to Texas and immediately got to work to get our house on the market. We knew we had a once-in-a-lifetime chance to make our most tightly-held dreams come true. And so we worked quickly, and before we knew it, we were listing our house for sale.
We knew the link would be shared on social media, so we knew we had to let people know what was going on before they saw it on Facebook!
I called a few of my closest friends, my mom, my sisters. Brandon called his parents, aunt and uncle, and a few friends. While they knew the Blue Ridge Mountains had been on our hearts, there was no way to know this big move was suddenly moving in a big way.
Most of the calls went in the same manner. We would say what we were doing. We would explain how quickly we got to this point. They could no doubt hear the excitement in our voices. And then there would be some really good questions to follow…
“Are you moving there with work?”
“No, we are keeping our same jobs, we work remotely now.”
“Well, do you know anyone who lives there?”
“No, not really. Only our realtor who we are working with to buy the house.”
“So you are moving there just because you want to?”
“Yes, we are moving there just because we want to.”
I guess even to myself it sounded a little crazy as I was saying it. I really had no explanation for why we were moving our family across the country, suddenly, other than the fact that we wanted to. We found ourselves explaining that we found the map dot, out of all the other map dots, where we truly wanted to be. It was the one place we had been that we continued to come back to. It was the one place that when we were there, we didn’t ever want to leave and when we weren’t there, we only wanted to go back.
We think if we had made this move after retirement, it would have been no big deal. We think then people move to all sorts of places simply because they want to. We guess it is not something people typically do while they are still working and raising kids.
But we did.
In the past, we made big moves based on big career changes in the name of doing what was best for our family. Each time we had good jobs, a good home, and good schools. Over time, we found we kept doing our best, but we weren’t being our best. We had lost sight of the things we set out to do when we were first married. We had always dreamed of a life where we lived in a small historic town, where we could live in an old historic house, where we could spend as much time with each other and as much time with our kids. We never once sat back and dreamed of working 10-hour days, to live in a cookie-cutter subdivision, to send our kids to schools that drained them of any remaining energy. Not once did we set out to live a life like that, and yet there we were.
And so we decided it was not worth keeping. We decided to choose a place we wanted to be and to live a life we wanted to live.
We decided to move just because we wanted to.
We have no regrets about anything we have done in this beautiful life we have been given the opportunity to live. We are just thankful we decided to finally live it the way we dreamed we would live it.
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