Here we go again

By Mike RuffinDuring our forty-three years of marriage, my Good Wife and I have moved, on average, every seven years. I sometimes joke that we move so regularly because I can’t keep a job. That’s not true. So far as I can tell, I have left every position voluntarily. I think wanderlust afflicts us. We get bored or antsy. Whatever the reason, we get the feeling that it’s time to move on. And so we do.We moved to Yatesville in 2015. I had started a new job at Smyth & Helwys Publishing in Macon. My new workplace was a thirty-minute drive from Yatesville. Due to the generosity of my late Uncle Jack, we owned a few acres on the farm where my father had been born and raised. So we decided to build a house on that land. That’s where we’ve lived for the last six years.I’m grateful that we’ve been there. It’s been good to be back in my home territory after forty years away. It’s been nice to live closer to family and to reconnect with old friends.I suppose I thought that our move to Yatesville would be our last one until we moved on to our permanent, heavenly home. It hasn’t worked out that way. When we moved to Yatesville, I said that I had come full circle. There was truth in that statement. But it may have implied that returning ‘home’ had been a life-long dream of mine. That wasn’t the case. We moved to Yatesville because it seemed convenient to do so more than for some other, greater reason.Besides, what was full circle for me wasn’t full circle for us. I left my home in Barnesville in 1975 to attend college at Mercer University in Macon. I met my future Good Wife Debra in 1976. We married in June of 1978. I had just graduated from Mercer, but she had a year to go. So we lived in Macon until she graduated the following summer. We left in August of 1979 to undertake our further adventures.By the time you read this, we will be settling into our new home in Macon. So in a very real sense, Debra and I have come full circle. We are back where we started four and a half decades ago. As was the case with my return to the area of my birth and upbringing, our return to Macon wasn’t something that we spent our lives hoping would happen. But now that it has, it feels right. We are grateful.I hope this will be the last move we ever make, but I’m not counting on it. I’ve learned better. Given the regularity with which our wanderlust symptoms have recurred, it may turn out to be a chronic condition.