Georgia - part 1

As I mentioned in last week’s piece, I’m headed back down to the GA / FL line for a few days to take care of some business and see some friends and family while I'm there. 

Obviously, I have unfinished business there with the house, but it recently hit me that there is so much more than that. 

This is probably as good a spot as any to lay the baseline that I had no original intention of leaving when we did. From where I was standing, we were in the perfect place, living in the most ideal situation, and I loved my life exactly the way that it was going. I was finishing my Bachelor’s degree, working full-time at a job I liked with coworkers that made it even more enjoyable, and my horses were boarded at a dreamy property owned by the kindest people on earth. We had it so good. 

Additionally, and this is important: we weren’t supposed to get orders until the end of 2025 (as far as we were made aware). That was why we bought the house in the first place in early 2024 - we thought that we had about two years before we’d have to leave and that the investment made perfect sense.

In some ways, it did make perfect sense; we needed more space, we loved the area, and I was working for a closing attorney, so why not right? 

All was well and good until my husband called me while I was at work and gave me the news. 

They asked for some volunteers to take the surprise orders to Virginia first. 

When no one took those opportunities, they went down the list of men and began to volun-tell them which lucky guys and their families would be going.

Considering how long we’d been there to this point, and my husband’s new rank, he would be one of the first to go.

Gotta love it, right?

Yes, yes, yes… I knew what I signed up for. That’s not my problem.

My problem is that I have an insurmountable tendency for absolute control, which I thought that I had regarding when (roughly) that we’d have to move, and that rug got ripped right out from under me.

All in all, I felt like I was at such a loss. I tried to do things the right way, I tried to be smart and make smart decisions, and as it so often happens, I lost complete control of a situation…

Get this - I had no control of it in the first place.

Naturally, that is not something that I would come to understand until months later. After the struggles of trying to sell a house and failing, months of living alone while doing so because the house not selling didn’t stop Sam from having to leave to fulfill his job duties.

It was genuinely the hardest season of my life that I’ve endured to date.

I’m sure this is the answer that you’ve come to expect from me by now, but the only thing that got me through that was falling back on my faith that I’d been keeping in my back pocket, and fully relinquishing God’s control back to Him in my mind, and accepting that He’d had it the whole time. 

With all of that in mind, it's easy to see where I’d gather the notion of things there feeling a bit unfinished - but it’s so much more than that once you cross the state line into the city of Jacksonville, FL.

I’d go as far as to say that my unfinished business there goes even deeper than that of Kingsland. 

It goes all the way back to the young, single, and quite frankly, crazy version of me that existed before my husband came into my life. 

Jacksonville holds so many memories, dreams, and history for me - and that version of me that never really left. 

Presently, the weight of all of this has begun to settle back down on my shoulders as I prepare to go back.

Going home - Jacksonville will always be that for me - is always delightful, but it doesn’t make the nostalgia sting any less. It can be hard returning to a place that you feel like may hold the keys to the pieces of yourself that seem to have gone missing for a while.

Though I stress about our house and preparing to try to sell it again, I’m sure that will be the easier part of my trip. 

But fixing the part of me that I can’t even bring myself to acknowledge is a different story. 

Stay tuned for the second - or first - part of this chapter of my life next week; where we go back to the very beginning: Florida.

Until next week,

— E. Byers, author of The Grassy Laine