Wanderlust

I was born with it. So was my daddy before me, and his before him.

Some families enjoy this wonderful stability that is passed from generation to generation. They are born, raised, live and die in the same community. That's the way they like it. That's the way it's supposed to be...for them. Not so for the Strother clan. We aren't nomads or gypsies, but we understand them pretty well.

My father and mother had moved enough before my sixth birthday that once, when we stopped at a Holiday Inn to spend the night on our way to visit family, I asked if that was our new home. Dad used to tell that story with a possum-eating-peat seed-grin. He failed to see the sadness in it that those of a more stable, or less adventurous, nature might.

Like my father, I moved my young family about at breakneck speed. Before Donya and I had been married five years, we had lived in three states - Texas, Missouri, and California - and six apartments. (Maybe I was trying to break Dad's record; not sure if I did, though.)

Dad eventually settled in a small town west of Fort Worth, and there I was mostly raised. I am glad he did, too. A kid needs to know where he's "from," even if he isn't. He probably did that for mom and me and my sister and the brother who would come along later...oh, and the other sister who would come along so much later, you'd wonder why she bothered at all.

I did, too. Settle down, I mean. Donya and I married in Arlington, Texas. We always felt it was home, and though we spent more than a decade in other places near and far, we finally settled where we started.

I don't wonder that a body needs a place to call home.

But in my heart, I still wander.