Take me home, West Virginia

Oh boy, am I progressing in my never-ending journey of discovering America.

It started in the distant 1994. I was fourteen. From Moscow to … Wichita, Kansas. After the summer in Wichita, I spent a year in Enid, Oklahoma.

Then, a decade later, two years in Boston, Massachusetts.

Then some years later Northern California.

Then a strange stretch in Memphis and Dallas.

Then Southern California.

Then Florida.

I’m not mentioning the places I visited as a tourist or we, as a family, visited as tourists or while traveling for our kids’ sports — for example, twenty-something national parks, and most of America’s major cities or not so major. Is New Orleans a major city? San Antonio?

I’m talking about the places where I actually lived. Maybe not for a very long time but experienced closely nonetheless.

Now — Charleston, West Virginia.

An ex-colleague of mine offered me a project in this place. My life is already complicated enough: I move between Southern California’s Orange County where my oldest son is in his final two years at high school and Southern Florida, where the rest of my family recently moved, primarily because of my younger kids’ tennis. This colleague stubbornly insisted that I have to spend most of my time during the week in Charleston, West Virginia. I needed to make more money so decided to give it a try.