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Migration Story- Southern Living
My life in the south has been divided among three states, and several locations in one of them. Indianapolis, Indiana is my birthplace and south of there is where my parents grew up. They left their rural upbringing to live in the big city, and my father worked for AT&T as a designer. They had me when they turned twenty-one. We rarely visited my grandparents, or the few cousins I have, so it was the three of us for four years. A job opportunity became available in Bristol, Virginia, the “birthplace of country music,” and that of my little brother. It’s near the lovely Appalachian Mountains; growing up here was amazing, we had lots of land and stayed pretty busy going to festivals and fishing in the cool mountain creeks. Once I hit middle school, I made new friends mostly from art class, choir, and band; this is when my love of music started to take hold and I took up playing guitar. High school was even better. I fell in love with my art classes, began winning contests and traveling with the honor choir. Then a bomb was dropped on my fourteen-year old world; after eleven and a half years my father took a job in Jackson, Tennessee.
My parents said they would never live in Tennessee and now we were moving there? The life I knew got complicated. Weekends would be spent traveling eight hours to west Tennessee and back. This part of Tennessee is flat, over-developed, and there was talk of living in a neighborhood. Reality hit when I had to say good-bye, and we moved in the middle of the night to arrive in the heat of a mid-June morning. School was a complete culture shock. There were a thousand more students and I arrived wearing tie-dye, which was not popular in this part of the state. The rest of the years went fine; I earned money by painting murals and working at Hobby Lobby. The money I saved would allow me to travel frequently and buy instruments. I didn’t want to attend college, but my mom got a job at a local University, so I went there and discovered ceramics and my love of sculpture. The ceramics professor encouraged his students to road trip a lot. I learned so much from these journeys, and my classmates became like family.
Right out of college I taught middle school, but decided teaching wasn’t for me. I had outgrown Jackson after eleven years and decided to move to Bloomington, Indiana for graduate school while working for Starbucks. This didn’t last long because I had just started dating a long time friend of mine. We fell in love, so I got a job closer to Jackson in the Nashville area about three hours away from him. I lived away from my family for three years, which was hard, but necessary. I needed to experience things for myself. After two years of a long distance relationship, I got married and I’m still planning my next move. Maybe this time I will move out of the triangle that is Tennessee, Virginia, and Indiana.
My life in the south has been divided among three states, and several locations in one of them. Indianapolis, Indiana is my birthplace and south of there is where my parents grew up. They left their rural upbringing to live in the big city, and my father worked for AT&T as a designer. They had me when they turned twenty-one. We rarely visited my grandparents, or the few cousins I have, so it was the three of us for four years. A job opportunity became available in Bristol, Virginia, the “birthplace of country music,” and that of my little brother. It’s near the lovely Appalachian Mountains; growing up here was amazing, we had lots of land and stayed pretty busy going to festivals and fishing in the cool mountain creeks. Once I hit middle school, I made new friends mostly from art class, choir, and band; this is when my love of music started to take hold and I took up playing guitar. High school was even better. I fell in love with my art classes, began winning contests and traveling with the honor choir. Then a bomb was dropped on my fourteen-year old world; after eleven and a half years my father took a job in Jackson, Tennessee.
My parents said they would never live in Tennessee and now we were moving there? The life I knew got complicated. Weekends would be spent traveling eight hours to west Tennessee and back. This part of Tennessee is flat, over-developed, and there was talk of living in a neighborhood. Reality hit when I had to say good-bye, and we moved in the middle of the night to arrive in the heat of a mid-June morning. School was a complete culture shock. There were a thousand more students and I arrived wearing tie-dye, which was not popular in this part of the state. The rest of the years went fine; I earned money by painting murals and working at Hobby Lobby. The money I saved would allow me to travel frequently and buy instruments. I didn’t want to attend college, but my mom got a job at a local University, so I went there and discovered ceramics and my love of sculpture. The ceramics professor encouraged his students to road trip a lot. I learned so much from these journeys, and my classmates became like family.
Right out of college I taught middle school, but decided teaching wasn’t for me. I had outgrown Jackson after eleven years and decided to move to Bloomington, Indiana for graduate school while working for Starbucks. This didn’t last long because I had just started dating a long time friend of mine. We fell in love, so I got a job closer to Jackson in the Nashville area about three hours away from him. I lived away from my family for three years, which was hard, but necessary. I needed to experience things for myself. After two years of a long distance relationship, I got married and I’m still planning my next move. Maybe this time I will move out of the triangle that is Tennessee, Virginia, and Indiana.