Had a eureka moment, thanks to W2R, when reading the ongoing rural/small town thread.
...
Personally? I think possibly you'd be better off finding a place that genuinely feels like home, and then figuring out "workarounds" for whatever it lacks. No place is perfect, as you have pointed out.
I thought that this was incredibly insightful and I didn't want to hijack that thread so...
What is it that makes your COMMUNITY feel like home to you? How long did it take for you to settle in? What made you suspect this was the right place BEFORE you made it permanent?
DW and I have struggled with this during our entire 37+ years of marriage. We've always been very happy with each other, but we've never found a place that feels like home. I would love to hear others' thoughts.
Wow, thank you for all the compliments (probably undeserved, but thanks anyway, I really appreciate any compliments that come my way).
To me, what matters is how much I feel that I fit in and the local culture. I have moved around a lot and really don't fit in anywhere 100%, and from your posts on that other thread I got the impression the same is true for you. Of all the places I ever lived, I felt Hawaii was more my home than anyplace. But to be brutally honest, I can't afford to live there and still have a nice house and plenty of money to spend. At my age, I want a certain level of comfort.
I have found that New Orleans is surprisingly similar to the Honolulu I knew years ago. No, really.
Both are/were essentially big small towns with a lot of tourism, friendly people (to a point), and definitely not bland with fascinating multicultural intricacies, languages, and histories. I think there are some overall cultural analogies such as Southern Hospitality vs The Aloha Spirit, even though the South and Polynesia are different in some ways too. I feel more accepted as myself and more at home here than I have felt in some locations. I think these cultural similarities are important. I have lived here (or in Baton Rouge, not too far away) for 21 years by now.
I moved here for a job, so I didn't know what to expect. I settled in right away, because I unfortunately had to learn that skill with all the moving around I have had to do in my life. Making friends was my top priority for the first year and after that I had plenty. I will never be as accepted here as a native New Orleanian might be, but it's getting really close to that level of acceptance. The same was true in Honolulu. It's important to adapt to a new home rather than trying to bring your old home with you (mentally). Nobody wants to hear about how great your last location was. Anyway, I have made a project out of making this my home and have worked hard at it. Katrina was a real heartbreaker for somebody like me who has never had a real home and was trying so hard to establish one.
After Katrina, we used all of our vacation time visiting other locations to identify someplace else we could move to, and we felt Springfield, Missouri was our best second choice. We checked it out through many visits, and doing the sorts of things there we would be doing in our daily lives once we retired. He found that getting a haircut there was very helpful, as he interacted with local men in the barber shop and got lots of good tips. I liked going to a local gym and checking out their facilities. We visited the local college campuses, walked on the nature trails, went to real estate open houses and chatted at length with realtors and sellers, shopped in the supermarkets, and so on. Springfield is very Christian, and we are agnostic, but still we felt we could fit in because we have many of the same values and we'd rather have people around us who have those values too.
But anyway, once we could see substantial progress in the post-Katrina recovery here, we decided to stay after all.
New Orleans has a lot of flaws, of course. It is not nirvana. The worst from our point of view is the crime here. Our work-around is living in a very established neighborhood that is as low in crime as any we can afford. And then, like any "good Southern boy" he is well armed. If things get too bad in this neighborhood, we may some day have to move away. But we are in our 60's and all we need is another 20-30 years. We are hoping things stay reasonable in our neighborhood for that long.
