Nomad

Someone asked me recently where I'd come from to Las Vegas, since every third person who works for the school district moved here from somewhere else. So, I went into the list...Maryland, then California, before that Wyoming. Yes, I have moved quite a bit. Is this the last place? I don't know.

The very first time I moved (and by that I mean really packed myself and left for a new home, not just college for a semester) was a choice I made because I was looking for adventure. Plus, I had a chance to go live by the ocean. I'd only seen the ocean for the first time the year before, and I was hooked. I knew one person in that city and she turned out to be fairly unreliable. But I figured out how to live there and, even though I had no job skills and was a really naive farm girl, it worked out. (God watches over the stupid evidently.) But all the other moves were the result of CoolGuy's job, except for this one to Las Vegas, which I initiated.

I've been thinking about it and I guess I'm just a nomad. My mom and her mother both lived nearly their entire lives in one place. They loved it there, and they had no desire to leave. My mom wasn't even comfortable being a snowbird. She liked her house and she liked the part of the world where it was located and that was that. I can't remember a time when I didn't want to see the other side of the mountain--literally and figuratively.

I could no more have spent my life living in one place than she could have lived her life moving around like the gypsies we must have seemed like to her. I've just always been curious about the next place. Not every town we lived in was just wonderful. Some of them we left quite happily. But I was always ready to see the next place and the next place. We managed to change ecosystems and regions with each move, too. So I've had a chance to learn a new culture, see new plants and animals and experience a wide variety of weather. Again, not all terrific, but certainly different from that to which I'd been accustomed.

Anyway, curiosity still piques me, now and then, so that when CoolGuy makes noises about moving to Israel for a couple of years, or northern California, or wherever...I consider the possibilities and think, "Hmmm, I'll wonder if they need teachers there?" and start contemplating what I'd pack and what I'd haul to the thrift store. We should just buy some camels and a big tent.