Waving goodbye: A (temporary) farewell to Macon

All my life, I've never quite fit in. A Persian name in a small English village. A Judy Garland fan in elementary school. A British immigrant with a posh accent in suburban Georgia. An outlandish dresser who hardly drank in college. A young adult with no frame of reference for America’s pop culture remembrances.

I was sure that with our move to Macon, my Not Fitting In-ness would reach an all-time high, and I would be relegated to raising chickens and making patchwork quilts to sell on Etsy to satisfy my free time.

What actually happened was I found my place in the world. This beautiful, eclectic, complicated, mixed city took me in and made me its own. It found me plenty of work, entertainment, friends, support, challenges and acceptance. It found me a home.

And now I find myself about to move across the country to California for 10 months, where I will be living in a 900-square-foot apartment with our 4-year-old daughter while my husband, Tim, completes a Knight Journalism Fellowship at Stanford University. It's an opportunity few could ever pass up and an adventure for our little family.

It's also scary — and a ridiculous amount of work — to coordinate and prepare for a cross-country trip and move while working a full-time job, working on a busy board, figuring out how to move everything across the country, finding suitable accommodations for our menagerie of pets, keeping our beautiful Macon historic home open for rental purposes (oh hello, Airbnb!) ... It makes my head spin just rethinking about everything that has led up to today.

Then there is the prospect of leaving this world of a village that has supported us every step of the way since we moved here. Knowing there is not just always someone to lean on, but that there is a line of folks ready to provide the support you need to push you back up on your feet again, whether in birth, death or broken washing machine. I've seen this community swell to back up causes and people and to overcome challenges and adversity.

Sometimes that leads to arguments, fierce disagreements where lines are drawn most definitely in the sand. But in the words of Leslie Knope, “These people are members of the community that care about where they live. So what I hear when I’m being yelled at is people caring loudly at me.”

That caring, that passion for this city and that diversity of experiences and opinions, that is what will draw me back home. Every time.

This story was originally published August 15, 2017 at 2:49 PM with the headline "Waving goodbye: A (temporary) farewell to Macon."