Moving away from Home.

Journal Jar - When did you move away from home? Describe where you lived and how you felt about it.

 In a way I have never moved away from home.  My heart still goes there, even though it is no longer there.  I will always be from Idaho route 5 box 147 Nampa.  It is interesting that I have now lived away longer than I lived there, however, it is still a major part of my identity.  Not to take away from the wonderful life I have though.  I think what I am trying to say is my childhood home gave me a wonderful foundation to grow from.

My departure from “home” (living away from my parents) came in transitional steps. I was very lucky in that way. I left for college in the fall of 1974. I didn’t have an apartment so I lived in the basement of my sister’s family home for the first half semester. Then I moved just down the road to an apartment with 5 other girls. So I had Earle and Karen near and my brother Dave had come home from a mission and was attending BYU also. So, I had a brother, sister, brother-in-law, niece, and nephew all in my ward and area. So I left home but kind of took it with me too.

This picture is outside of my first home and it shows Angela and Matthew with me after knee surgery.  It was great to have family near during that experience.

When it comes to how I felt leaving home, I felt fine. It was great to be out in the wide world on my own, until the first time I got sick. I remember lying by the toilet, totally miserable and wanting my Mommy. Luckily I didn’t have too many sick days. So life was good.

The other part of transitional moving out is I went home each summer for a few years. It was great to have moved out but still belong at home too.

This is a picture of my apartment bedroom.  It looks like I took home with me anyway.  I would jump from the appartment to home over the next four years.  I had great roommates most of the time.   Here is a picture of roomates in 1978, so the last ones I had.

Brenda Brown is the one on the left bottom.  She was my roommate from the very beginning to the end.  She was 25 when I was 18 and not very happy about taking on another little girl.  She did it as a favor to my sister.  However, we became great friends.  It was a good experience learning to live with different personalities. I wish I had taken pictures of roommates every year.  I will have to take time to write about some of those experiences sometime soon.  I learned something different from each one.

That brings me to my final move out. 

I was very lucky again, to have my husband to be take an internship near my home town, so that I could live at home and prepare to get married.  This was home but only for a couple of months, I say we never had a honeymoon, because we never went anywhere.  This though was a honeymoon.  We had no phone and noone really knew us.  So we had 2 months or so of just being together.  Gerald had work of course and we went to visit family on the weekends but this was heaven.  I was happy to move away from home and make a home of my own.  It is a good thing to love home but leave home.