Home Sweet Home?

A friend of mine posed the question "If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be?"

This is a subject that is a bit of a sore spot for me. For coming up on 18 years now, I haven't had a choice of where I wanted to live. The Marine Corp says "go to California", "go to North Carolina", "go to Okinawa, Japan" and we pack our boxes and off we go.

Except for three sweet years when Dave was stationed at Naval Air Station Dallas, working with the reservist station there, we have lived at least 24 hours driving distance from our families. We've missed little brothers growing up and becoming men and our young nephews becoming teen-agers. We've missed Christmas, Thanksgiving, anniversaries, birthdays, and in some cases, we've missed weddings and funerals.

Now that the end of Dave's Marine Corp career is in sight, just two to five years away, we're starting to look forward to moving to a place of our choosing.

Of course we haven't quite made that choice yet.

Dave's parents own a Napa Auto Parts store in their small, small town in Kansas. They have expressed a desire to have us come back to their neck of the woods and help the family business.

But Dave and I have always considered ourselves Texans, so we feel a strong desire to move there as well. And the fact that Texas has no state income tax is a motivating factor there.

With all my family in Texas and all of his in Kansas, Oklahoma would be, from the outside, a logical choice. The problem there being that there is long standing rivalry between Texans and Oklahomans. There is NO WAY on God's green Earth that this Texas girl is going to live in Oklahoma! (I know lots of dirty Oklahoma jokes, if anyone is interested)

One big concern we have is this: for the last 18 years, it has been just me and Dave. Just the two of us against the world. I'm worried that our families will be so excited that we are back in the area that they will suffocate us. We're going to have to have a long talk with both sides and make sure they understand that they are all going to have to give us our space sometimes and understand what a big adjustment this is going to be for us.

So to answer Susie's question; I don't know the exact location that we're going to live when we finally get to make our own decision on the matter, but I do know it's going to be a Red state!!