Titled "Find Your Way Back"
My husband and I are both from the Sacramento area; most of our families are here, as is much family history. But when we were young and first married, we could hardly wait to get the heck away from here. As far as I was concerned, Sacramento was an overgrown cow-town with little to offer. Scott was joining the Army as a pilot about the same time as I was graduating from college and we were eager to start our adventures in faraway places.
The first place I landed (after he finished basic training) was flight training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. Different is what we wanted and different is what we got and I soon discovered that the biggest city in Alabama at that time was not as big as the little "cow-town" I had come from. The larger town with a real mall about half an hour from the post was about the same size as the little college town just west of my home, which I suddenly realized was actually a city.
It was in Alabama that I first became homesick for the dry brown hills of California... for a vista that I could look out over and see mountains with snow caps in the Spring, for the farmlands of the Central Valley running past the long freeways that connect north to south... all the things I had never known I loved.
From Alabama we moved to Germany then to Colorado, where my husband had his final assignment. The life of an Army gunship pilot wasn't all we had dreamed of for our growing family and we had started to feel a little like Dorothy over the years, often saying "There's no place like home!"
We happily returned to Northern California, to home with family and landscape and weather we know and love. We returned first to a smaller place in the valley, with a commute to the Bay Area, then were quite thrilled to make our way back to our home city of Sacramento, now wishing other family transplanted to far flung spots would come back, too, just for visits, if for nothing else.
There's no saying we won't ever leave again, but I don't think it would be to go to far...
