Never say never, or you’ll end up moving there

Rebecca Horton quotes herself, and then her grandmother’s reply, on the Passionately Alive blog today:

“I am not interested in living in the suburbs, end of story.” – me

“I’m just going to warn you Rebecca, and please take this to heart, if you say things like that then you will never get married.” – Grandma

Methinks grandma is a little out of touch with modern culture, but that’s really none of my business and not the point of this post. Rebecca’s post reminded me to never say never. And here’s why.

Reason number one: My mother grew up in New Jersey. She attended college in Minneapolis. When in college she and the girls road-tripped it to Colorado for fun. They happened to stop in a fairly non-descript town called North Platte. My mother distinctly remembers saying how she could never live in a place like North Platte.

A few years later she met my father while teaching in Washington D.C. They moved back to Nebraska when dad got out of the Air Force, and after brief stints in Hastings and Grand Island, they ended up in North Platte.

Reason number two: When I was being reared by my mother — whilst we dwealt in North Platte — we road-tripped it to north-central Arkansas. Some years earlier my father purchased property in a supposedly up-and-coming development as an investment. The investment tanked, largely, but we drove down to this resort town anyway on account of the connection.

I was around thirteen years old at the time.

On that little vacation, my first taste of the Ozarks, my mother remembers my announcement that “I could never live down here. There are too many trees.” This makes sense coming from a boy growing up on the Plains. However, and needless to say at this point, I now live in Arkansas, on the western edge of the Ozarks.

Photo from Wikipedia of the Boston Mountains, the southern Ozarks.