Meet You in the Middle

You've heard of the middle of nowhere. Let me tell you a little about the middle of everywhere.

My wife and I met while attending a small college in central Arkansas. She was a "city" girl from northwest Ohio. I grew up in south Arkansas, just a few miles from the Louisiana line. My wife now claims she had to tell numerous people back home before leaving for college that "by no means will I marry someone from Arkansas."

Funny how life can play out.

We met, fell in love and married in 1991. My first job was in south Arkansas so we lived there a few years. She claimed she was going to write a book titled, "Hog-Tied", a tongue-in-cheek look at a city girl forced to live in Razorback country. After a few years, we got the opportunity to move to West Virginia. More pay, better working hours, closer to her relatives, etc.

Arkansas to West Virginia. Yes, we heard some jokes on both ends. My wife was waiting for the call to move to Mississippi after that.

West Virginia was lovely and had lovely people. It was also absurdly cold. It was absurdly cold for about 10 months of the year. After three years there, we started looking around again.

We remembered a moment, back in college, when we were sitting in the university's library. We were at the point that we were fairly certain we'd one day be married, but we were not yet engaged. I started the conversation with, "You realize that we're going to have problems with holidays ... and grandparents seeing grandchildren ... things like that?"

"What?" she said.

"We need to find a place that's going to suit both of us, a place that can truly be our home," I said.

It was still several years before Internet access was as common as telephones, so I retrieved a map and started looking.

"Let's see what is the midway point between our hometowns, geographically," I said. "Maybe that'll work."

After some quick math and defacing a map supplied by our beloved university, we decided Murfreesboro, Tenn., wasn't just the geographical center of Tennessee - it is - but it was also our geographical center. The moment passed and we thought little about the conversation for the next six years.

Back to West Virginia and I'm shoveling snow - again.

"You remember when we figured out the halfway point between our hometowns?" I asked as my wife helped knock ice off the windshield.

"Yeah, I think," she said.

"Murfreesboro, Tennessee," I said aloud. "Ever been there?"

It turns out she had been through Murfreesboro quite a few times growing up, on vacation treks from Ohio to Florida. Nothing worth remembering, though.

"I'm looking at a job there," I said.

"Oh?" was the surprised reply.

Long story short, I applied for the job and soon after, we moved to middle Tennessee. We spent some wonderful years there, met fantastic friends and, when we left four years later to return to our old college town, we vowed we'd someday return to Tennessee. Count this as an official endorsement of Murfreesboro - and all of middle - Tennessee. We spent time walking through Civil War cemeteries, tossing rocks into Stones River and enjoying the sites and sounds of Nashville, just 30 miles away.

The schools are tremendous, there's an airport nearby and enough restaurants that a person would never tire of having to have the same old thing. For our extended family, it was a perfect location, too. Countless times we had overnight guests who would stop and say, "You guys were right on the way."

"Of course we are," we'd smile and say and begin bringing pillows out of the closet.