A memoir of sorts--Coming back home to Tennessee

I love this maple tree that my then husband John dug from the woods behind our house when it was a mere sapling and planted in the front year the first year that we lived in our house--1984. 

In looking back at my life, I realize now why and how I chose Middle Tennessee for settling down into my adult life. Since my father was an electrical engineer who worked in construction for the DuPont company, we moved around as I was growing up. Dad joined DuPont the same year I was born--1949--and we moved about every other year after that as he climbed up the career ladder. Mostly, we lived in various places in the South East, from Charleston and Camden, South Carolina, to Chattanooga, Tennessee, to Richmond, Virginia, to Madison, Tennessee--that's five towns--all before I was eight years old.

Then on to Old Hickory, Tennessee, and to Louisville, Kentucky, when I was in junior high. Back to Madison, Tennessee, for my best high school years--my sophomore and junior years--then to Wilmington, North Carolina, and Grifton, North Carolina, to finish up my high school. Yes, that's right, we moved to five more towns while I was in seventh through twelfth grades. I attended two high schools in my senior year. As you can imagine, my education was somewhat piecemeal and spotty. I would study some things twice while completely missing other things.

So I know that for you, dear reader, this is just a list of names of ten towns, but imagine if you will, you're growing up, and you make a few good friends, and then you get word once again from your parents that you are moving to a new place. You have to walk into a new school, a new building, a new classroom, and look on the sea of faces staring back at you. Some schools, some teachers handled getting a new kid mid-year in stride; others not so much. Some families if they were loving and supportive enough of each other could have weathered such moving around; my family not so much. In my next installment of my memoirs, I will share with you what I consider to be my best and worst moves and why they were.

Finally, as my parents were transferred to Seaford, Delaware, I begged my father to let me go to Middle Tennessee State University, where several of my Madison High School friends were attending. We didn't consider that for the out-of-state fee that he was going to have to dish out, I could have attended at private college!

So if you count them up, it's no wonder that if, as a child and teen, I was searching for a "home," then Tennessee was that place. I had lived here three times before I went to college--(1) kindergarten and first grade in Chattanooga, (2) fourth, fifth, and sixth grades at Neely's Bend Elementary School in Madison, and (3) my sophomore and junior years at Madison High School. And for some reason, those Tennessee experiences--at least before I got to college--had always proved to be my best times. Though we had moved away between those places, we always seemed to be coming back to Tennessee. If there had been any place that I could call "home," it was Middle Tennessee. By the time I was 18, I had become a full-fledged Tennessean!

After a few years of college in Murfreesboro, I married my high school sweetheart Tommy Cooper from Madison High School and moved to Clarksville, where I finished college. I joined the faculty at Cheatham County Central High School and lived in Ashland City for a couple years. Then a friend and I moved to the big city of Nashville. A few years after my second marriage, my husband John and I and our one-year-old daughter moved to Kingston Springs, where I have lived in the same house since 1984! Before that I owned and lived in two condominiums in Bellevue at Belle Forest. The best thing about Belle Forest Condominiums was the woods (the forest) that surrounded it, where I took lots of walks, jogs, and strolls with my new baby.

This is my house a few years ago before I took the shutters off and painted it sage green. I am quite proud of painting the outside of my house almost completely by myself a couple years ago in the spring and early summer of 2011. I had had a grey tin roof put on several, several years ago. The sound of the rain on that tin roof is marvelous.

As you can imagine, I had dreamed of a house with a yard for many, many years before we moved into this house. I spent many a weekend driving around looking at houses in Nashville neighborhoods that I knew we could not afford. I had told my then husband John that Kingston Springs seemed like a nice town, so one weekend we were driving around the little town when we saw this house with a for sale sign in its front yard. We loved the house immediately!

I was 35 years old when we moved here, and I'll be 65 this coming year. Wow, I need to celebrate my having lived in my house for 30 years in May 2014! I was the second owner. Before I lived in this house, a young couple--the Bickfords--had lived here for seven years. The handy husband built on the den, the screened-in porch, the carport, and the outbuilding. Of those four, I appreciate the carport the most; it protects my car! But the outbuilding is good for storing kayaks! And the den has become my TV room, whereas the living room is my sitting/reading room. And ah, that wonderful screened-in porch!

My screened-in back porch is one of the really cool things about my house. In the spring, early summer, and autumn, it gets used quite a bit. There's my little dog Finn looking around the corner in this snapshot.

My house is the only house that I have ever lived in in my adult life, and as you can tell, I'm really partial to it. It's my home. Sometimes, I try to visualize who will live in my house after I'm gone and what changes they will make. Of course, I can't see the future, but I would wish for someone who would love it as much as I have. I know that there are bigger houses and fancier houses, but I have always been proud and grateful when I pull into my driveway, and there is my little house. It is, indeed, my castle!

This was my back year before the flood of 2010 took 25 to 50 of its trees. It used to look like a park and had a creek running through it. The child Ellen enjoyed many hours playing in that creek. Now Nature is busy restoring it as best she can. The red bud tree is still there!