I lived in South Carolina for all of my remembered childhood. I grew up shifting from house to house occasionally, but by and large my family remained centered around the same city, where my father worked. I went to church there, and school (albeit briefly, I was homeschooled for all but one year), and played organized baseball, basketball, and soccer. I went on field trips, hung out at the library, knew the entire park inside and out, could tell you where the best spot to pick up boiled peanuts was, and why you probably didn't want to ask about that old house on the corner of Cashua and 2nd Loop....
When I was in the fifth grade, the plant my father worked at began laying off employees left and right because of financial concerns. My father had almost ten years on the job, but he wasn't sure that even tenure would protect him after long, and so he began searching elsewhere. He found another job in about three months.
The job offer was in Tennessee.
Sure, I'd been outside the state a few times. I'd been as far up as Delaware, and visited North Carolina and Georgia frequently. But I'd always known exactly where Home was—especially the last five years, when we were able to find a good neighborhood and a house big enough to support five (soon six) people. But this news meant that everything was turning upside down, almost. I would have to start completely over; no friends to be there waiting for me, no idea what the house would be like, what there was to do, nothing.
So we moved.
When we got there, and bought a house, we had no clue how the town worked. We had to spend the next few weeks learning all the little things: public trash pickup, and what day it came on; where the supermarkets, churches, utilities, and the library were; how the streets flowed together, especially in our neighborhood, and where people from the other side of town tended to get lost; what school zones we were in.
And what about those memories we all had from back in SC? What happened to them? We didn't get the option to stay with them; we were forced to leave.
Actually, we kept them.
