Coming Home
Two years ago today Jad and I rolled into Cary, NC with two cars full of stuff and two very tired cats. We didn’t know it yet, but we had finally found a place to call home. I grew up in Austin, Texas, which is a really fantastic city but by the time I had finished college, I was itching to go elsewhere. I found myself going to grad school at the University of Iowa. Iowa City would not have been my first choice of a new town but I grew quite fond of it during my years there, as it is a great little college town. By the time I was done with school, though, after surviving several brutal winters, I was ready for warmth and palm trees. Jad and I packed up all our things and moved to San Diego.
I wish I had a dollar for every time someone in North Carolina has asked me why the heck we would leave San Diego to move here. Well, as gorgeous as San Diego is, it wasn’t the place for us. Too expensive, too crowded, too loud, too MUCH. I never got comfortable there. I didn’t feel like I lived there, just that I was on a long working vacation. I don’t think San Diego wanted us there.
About midway through our unhappy year in San Diego, we did some research on places that we thought might suit us and North Carolina kept popping up on lists of best places to live. The funny thing is, Cary is someplace we considered before moving to San Diego, but I decided it sounded too boring (and that was before I moved here and found out some people call it Beigeville). We flew here to check out Chapel Hill. We got in at night and I will always remember that drive to our hotel on winding roads through dense thickets of trees. After being accustomed to the always-on city lights and noises, I felt like we were entering Twin Peaks territory.
We thought NC was gorgeous but decided that even though Chapel Hill was really pretty, it didn’t feel right for us. We checked out downtown Raleigh and that particular Sunday afternoon, things were absolutely dead. It felt like a ghost town. I know now that we just caught it at an off time, but in that moment, it was disheartening. We just barely drove through the edge of Cary before going back to our hotel and then flying back to California the next day, figuring we had to start all over again in searching for a new place to live.
A matter of weeks later, we were kicking ourselves for not bothering to check out Cary while we were here, because on paper, Cary seemed to fit the bill. So we flew back out here, this time to properly check out Cary. We’ve learned that somehow we never do things the easy way. We were only here a few days before we decided what the hell, let’s move here. So we scrambled to find an apartment before we had to fly back. A matter of months later we had arrived, cats in tow, this time to start the next chapter. We got our first meal from the Cook Out on Walnut Street near Crossroads, the first of many, many times we’d do so.
Now I’m a born-and-bred Texan but as most Southerners would agree, Texas isn’t quite Southern in the traditional sense. It’s a whole ‘nother entity. So the joys of sweet tea, hush puppies, collard greens, banana pudding, sweet potato pie, and NC style BBQ were all new to me. Since living here, a whole new world of culinary pleasures have been opened up to me. I have eaten with gusto and wondered where North Carolina has been all my life. And what better place to live than the Triangle, with a thriving food scene that just keeps getting more interesting. Cary is not a hotbed of excitement, it is not a funky, quirky, colorful place like the one I grew up in, and no one’s going to be making “Keep Cary Weird” bumper stickers any time soon. However, for all it’s dullness, Cary works as a home base for us and the joy of the Triangle is that there is always something interesting to do somewhere.
I know I’m just another transplant (and that I have a lot to learn about Southern food) but I feel like I belong here. You can never quite predict what will make a place feel like home, you just know it when you find it.