Twenty-one years ago today, PC and I moved to this city from our small town roots in western Nebraska.  We arrived with a little car full of books and clothes and pots and pans, $300 in PC’s wallet, no jobs and nowhere to live. 

Our friend Pat and his roommate Becky let us crash in their living room for a couple of days, and other friends found us jobs within that time.  We used the last of our money to put a deposit on a tiny one bedroom apartment in an old brick building on a busy street corner.  The apartment had a kitchen the size of a closet, a living room, a bathroom and one little bedroom with a wooden fire escape.  It was across from a grocery store.  $210 a month rent. 

Our friends Terri and Gene brought us a box of groceries, which included the “new” blue kool-aid just out in 1988.  They also, God bless their hearts, brought over a window air conditioner unit they had been using in their old apartment.  I was not used to how humid it is here, and was in misery before the AC was put in the window and spent the first week bawling with homesickness, sitting by the AC unit, wondering if this move had been the worst mistake of our lives.

I occasionally walked the 2+ miles to my job at a grocery store deli on the north side of town, at an intersection where some of the highest crime rates in the city were centered.  PC got a job as a line cook at a restaurant.  Our apartment had roaches, and the neighbor lady washed her clothes in the bathtub on the other side of our bathroom. 

We did our laundry in the basement of the building, and the machine was so old that $1.00 in quarters did all our wash because the coins fell out of the bottom of the slot after we pushed it in, allowing us to reuse the same money, load after load. 

We had no telephone, and for a while, no vehicle when our car broke down and we couldn’t afford repairs.  After about six months, we had no money and no food.  We lived for two weeks on a large sack of potatoes.  Finally, we broke down and called PC’s parents collect from a phone booth and borrowed money.  Until it came, we had a sack of groceries a minister brought from the local food pantry.

Twenty-one years in this city, and now we sit in our modest house with the green lawn and full basement, thinking of the property taxes that pay for the public schools, and I don’t think a week goes by without us thinking back to those humble, bare beginnings and the knowledge that the life we have now would have been unthinkable riches to us back then.  Enough food.  Central air conditioning.  An adorable daughter snoozing in her own bedroom.  Two cars and a pickup truck.  A garage.  A quarter acre lot full of lush green grass. 

And friends all over the city, people we know, a working knowledge and familiarity with the city that makes it more home to us than anywhere we ever lived before.  This is home.  This is where we belong.

That day we drove into town with almost literally nothing, we could never have predicted how far we’d come.  We’ll never forget it, we’ll never take it for granted.