Home, or something like it

Almost three years to the day that I left Ohio, I returned. Older? Yes. Wiser? That remains to be seen.

First, a little background. I'm an Ohioan. It's the state where I was born, educated and employed. With the exception of six months spent in Scotland on a study abroad program when I was 20, I'd spent my entire life in the Buckeye State. It's not that I necessarily planned it that way, but as most of you can probably understand, life has a way of just happening. What eventually happened to me, at the age of 30, was marriage, followed within the month by a phone call informing us that my new husband's first posting with the Air Force would be at RAF Mildenhall in England. We greeted the news as any sober, mature couple would: by jumping up and down and screaming as soon as the phone had been safely cradled on its receiver.

Wil and I enjoyed our lives in Columbus, but living abroad held an irresistible appeal. The chance to travel, to try on a new lifestyle, to both listen to and produce funny accents. And for three years, we did just that. From April 19, 2006 to April 18, 2009, we lived in bonny old England. We even managed to find a house, and eventually a job for me, in the uber-English city of Cambridge. I could blather on here about how wonderful it was, but I've done quite a bit of that in my previous blog - cambridged.blogspot.com - so I'll just be succinct here and say it was a good experience.

Which brings us, loosely, up to now. To our great and enduring surprise, when Wil received the phone call telling him where his next assignment would be, the voice on the other end of the line informed him we were heading to Wright-Patterson, in Dayton, Ohio. While we had expected that sooner or later our paths might well take us back to my home state (Wil's a West Virginia boy, although he's spent his entire adult life in Ohio), it was about the last place we expected the Air Force to send us.

And so, here I am, in Dayton, Ohio. Home, but not quite. We're in southwest Ohio, more than an hour from Columbus and three hours away from my hometown in northeast Ohio. I'm still a bit dazed. I spent Palm Sunday in Belfast and Easter in Prague and now, just a few short weeks later, I'm sitting in a Caribou Coffee in a mall designed to look like a real town, located within the actual town of Beavercreek, Ohio. I went from living in a fully-furnished home, with a full-time job, walking almost everywhere I needed to go... to living in an empty apartment (until our furniture finishes its voyage across the Atlantic, we're making do with an air mattress and a card table and four chairs) to unemployment and owning, with Wil, two vehicles that are pretty much required for any journey. It's a bit of an adjustment, to say the least.

The good news? I no longer have the funny accent, but oddly, after three years of hearing English accents almost exclusively, everyone around me sounds a bit strange. And that's just the start of what's strange, even as everything feels so very familiar. If you're English and reading this, the familiar things I plan to write about in the coming months will probably end up sounding quite strange, just as my American readers will probably find the strange things I describe sounding quite familiar. Confused? Don't worry. So am I.