7/7/77

You know how there are some days/dates you'll always remember? 7/7/77 is an easy one for me. My brother Matt gets annoyed at how Mom and I bring it up every year, so of course we both had to mention it on his facebook page today. :D
This morning when my kids asked me what happened on that day 35 years ago, I answered, "We drove away from Virginia...and broke my heart." I was joking when I said it, but surprised myself by actually getting tears in my eyes!
I lived in Virginia from age 5 to age 10. I started school there, got saved and baptized, learned how to sled by myself and ride a 2-wheeler, was a GA and a Brownie and then a Girl Scout. I made forever-friends and spent hours playing with them in the cul de sac where we lived or in one of our back yards. I learned to love history by visiting Mount Vernon and Williamsburg and Philadelphia. I learned to love nature by hiking and camping in Prince William National Forest. I even learned some French at school! It was a great place to be a kid.

The families we spent holidays with--this is Easter.

And it was great to be able to live there for 5 years, twice as long as usual. But the day came--7/7/77--when we were transferred to San Diego, California. The movers had come and packed up all our stuff, and we hugged our friends good-bye and loaded up our blue Plymouth with my 2 big brothers and I in the back seat (guess who was in the middle?!). We were pulling a trailer with our camping stuff, and I had my Winnie the Pooh and Raggedy Ann and a map of the US, and our adventure began! I think we stopped in Tennessee the first night, and I remember us sitting around the camp fire feeling pretty blue. But by the next night we were in Arkansas to visit family for a week or so, and then we had the excitement of tracking our journey on the map, and pretending I was Laura Ingalls setting across the prairie when we camped in Oklahoma (where the ground was so hard we couldn't even pound the tent pegs in) and seeing the Grand Canyon (where we actually got to stay in a HOTEL!). Crossing into California was a bad day. I remember we'd been looking forward to a rest stop, and when we reached it, it was just a cactus and a porta potty in the middle of the desert. Which was so hot our air conditioner couldn't keep up. And we were on vinyl seats.
We eventually made it to our temporary home in National City (AKA Nasty City), and then our permanent home in Spring Valley, and while it was never our favorite place to live, I did make some more forever-friends, and discovered that I absolutely loved the beach. I got to go on a field trip to a Marine Floating Biological Laboratory and Torrey Pines, and to further my love of history at Old Town San Diego, as well as visit Disneyland and Sea World and the Zoo and Universal Studios. And as my mom always told us, home is wherever we are all together.
But a piece of my heart will always be in Virginia!