One Year in Texas

 

Today marks the one year anniversary of the Hopper clan’s move to Texas.

What have I learned and accomplished this past trip around the Sun?

What’s the best thing about Texas, for me?


Well, to be honest, that’s a tough one. I could go on about higher earnings, lower taxes, bigger house, newer house, new cars, and all that material stuff, but in reality we were doing well in New Jersey and now we’re doing a little better 1,550 miles away. I feel that it’s a better place for my girls, though they’ll be loath to admit it. I could mention how I got a better paying job working with nice people in seven weeks, eliminating one of my existential fears about the move. I could mention more, but I don’t think I’d be writing anything of lasting importance.

So, what’s the best thing about Texas, for me?

It might sound kinda goofy, but for the past twelve months I’ve felt – no, been inundated – with a sense of promise down here. That something good is just around the corner. It’s a cloud I’ve been walking through for my entire time down here. But it’s not something passive; it’s something that will demand an active response from me. I think I know what that is, I’m just gearing and screwing myself up to do it. Aw heck it’s analysis paralysis, but of a much lesser and weaker kind than the form that overwhelmed me in Jersey. And that “cloud of promise” was never present to me up in the northeast.

That’s all I have to say. I have lived elsewhere in the past; eight or nine towns in New Jersey, three semesters at Rutgers, an eighteen month stint down in Maryland. Although we made some good friends down in Maryland, I never truly liked it down there and was always looking forward to a return. Now, though, in Texas, despite having good friends and great relatives up north, I’m not homesick for the Garden State.

Texas is home for me, at least for now.

(And plane travel several times a year is now the new normal!)