Days of Thanks #3

I am so grateful to have a place that I call home. My family moved around a few times when I was young, until we finally settled in Charlotte when I was almost ten. But my parents moved away from there when I graduated from college, so it never became “home” either—it was not where I went for holidays or visits with my parents. Until we moved to DC in 2007, I had lived in the Triangle for twelve of the preceding thirteen years, either in Chapel Hill or Durham. And UNC Law gave me the first sense of community I’d had since my high school youth group days. (Meeting Ed was no small part of this, of course). So even though I grew up mostly in Charlotte, I list Chapel Hill as my “hometown,” because that is what it is to me. And whenever I go there, I feel at home in a way I have never felt in my life.

So I’m especially grateful that it will soon be my permanent home once again (and hopefully forever this time). I’ve been invited to join the faculty at the law school as a Clinical Assistant Professor in the Writing and Learning Resources Center, which means that beginning in the fall of 2012, I will be teaching first-year legal research and writing at UNC Law. I can barely believe my good luck to have an opportunity to return not only to the town I love so much, but to the faculty of the school that gave me so much.

We will probably move in late spring/early summer. A day will come soon when it begins to really hit me what it will mean to leave the only place that Hudson ever lived with us. I can’t even imagine how that is going to feel. But for now, I feel so grateful to be moving back home, to live so close to my children’s grandparents and a few aunts and uncles, to have only a few more long trips down I-95 to endure, and to be able to give my children such a wonderful place to grow up. I want so much for them to have a feeling of home and community that I never had, and this move will be the first step in that direction.