About moving and missing the old homestead:

My family moved a lot when I was growing up, and I've continued that way of life as an adult. Sometimes it was almost heartbreaking, like what Grishny was talking about, and sometimes it was a relief, like what Quartz mentioned.

Anyway, Mike and I moved last week into our own house, with a mortgage and a backyard and everything. We left behind an apartment complex almost identical to the one Quartz described, right down to the color scheme. (Of course, it's name evoked a pastoral image--"Hunter's Meadow." Those complexes and developments always do.) It was tiny and had a ton of speed bumps to endure before reaching our building, plus the neighborhood was urban sprawl at it's worst, and we couldn't allow our cat to go outside because the freeway ran behind us.

Our new house is wonderful, and I won't describe it---if anyone is interested, I'll be setting up a page devoted to it on my website.

I'm a *very* sentimental person, and I have good memories from events and places that most people would forget, even places where I was unhappy have a certain nostalgia attached to them. Such as when my parents were impoverished and we lived in a trailer park full of miserable people next to a sewage treatment facility, where the neighbors were mean to us because we were actually the poorest people in the trailor park (I liked the woods that were behind the last row of trailors). But, Hunter's Meadow was so boring and unpleasant that I was not wistful in the least when we moved. After we decided to buy our new home, that complex instantly seemed distant and unfamiliar, even though we were still living there.

I'm a bit mystefied, really. I mean, that apartment is where Mike and I would go after we first started dating, and he would make me spaghetti and we'd watch Star Trek all night. It was our first home together. But still, there's nothing felt for it. Maybe I'm growing out of my
sentimentality?

--Jez"hausfrau"zika