Where I live.

It's interesting to me because for such a long time I really marveled at the large number of people (even of people with the necessary means) who, growing up in one particular spot, don't leave the place they grow up in.  It's not that the place I grew up in was particularly constricting or backward — I grew up in the suburbs around Dayton, Ohio, nothing particularly wrong with that — but I can't remember ever having the expectation that I would stay there as an adult.  Where you choose to live, I thought, is an expression of your individuality.  City girl or country boy.  Northeast, Southwest, ocean or mountains or plains.  Leave the country even, live in another place if you want, but find the place that suits you if you can.  It's only chance that planted you where you are; why would anyone expect that this particular roll of the dice is where you'd thrive?

(People whose family moved around a lot as kids weren't in my calculation at all here.)

Anyway, I did wind up moving away, and as it turns out the place I picked to settle for the rest of my life does suit my taste extremely well.  I live in a city, and I remained in the Midwest (I guess, some people call this the plains).  As a child I dreamed of living in a big city, New York or San Francisco; I think now that I'm a Midwestern girl, so that Chicago might have worked well but (there being not much else big to speak of) that's about it.

But this has happened to me before:  When I decided where to live for the rest of my life, I didn't know I was doing it at the time.  I thought I was picking a grad school.  Since then my sweetheart's (unexpected to me) decision to quit his Cincinnati job and follow me, marriage, children, and good friends have gathered around me ("like so much cement!"  no wait, that is not the image I want, hm) and, well, here I am for good, here in Minneapolis, and I'm happy.

(Sometimes, at night, I wake up in a cold sweat, thinking of what might have been, and want to fall to my knees and thank the good Lord that I did not decide to go to Berkeley.  It was a close call.)

So:  I left, and I am in a good place.   At first I continued to be astonished at people who didn't leave.  Not, again, that suburban southwestern Ohio is a bad place to be, but just that so many people were happy in the place that chance had put them.  And even weirder, that some folks (relatives for instance) would ask, "When are you moving back home?"  

I'm not moving "home," at least not home to Ohio.  Home isn't in Ohio anymore, it's in Minneapolis!  Why would I leave…

…why would I leave my home?

Anyway, after a few years of saying that, the irony got through my own skull.  I have reasons to live here by now that are not at all about "expressing my individuality" or about "living in the kind of place that suits me."  Not even about where my job is, or where my husband's job is.  City vs. suburbs, there's some leeway there (or at least there will be when the housing market settles down), but it's been long enough that I can say, okay, I get it now.