Wait, where is that?
I was downstairs in my room, probably doing homework or playing a game with my older brother Jake when I heard the same, familiar call I had heard thousands of times before. My little brother Jordan yelled down the stairs
“Jake, Jason, it’s time for dinner!” we heard from upstairs.
After finishing the problem, I rushed up the stairs with my brother, just like we would any other day. Everything was shaping up to be another good night filled with very little homework and a lot of fun. Or so I thought.
We were sitting around the dinner table. It was quiet... too quiet. Normally by now my mom or dad would have asked us how school was going, how our basketball or soccer game went, something like that. Not today though, today we just sat in silence. We knew something was up, so it came as no surprise to us when my dad wiped off his mouth, then proceeded to give us the news.
He asked us, “How would you guys feel if we moved?”
My older brother Jake, younger brother Justin and I knew exactly what this meant. He didn’t need to word it as a question, the only one of us that took his question literally as a question as my littlest brother, Jordan, being only a first grader at the time.
“Why?” My brothers and I asked nearly simultaneously.
My dad responded, “I got a promotion at work, to be the head of an office in North Dakota.”
Jordan promptly asked, “Dad, how far away is North Dakota from America?”
That gave us all a good laugh, and made the situation a little lighter. There were several other questions answered that evening, most of which made us less and less excited and more and more scared. My dad explained to us that we would be leaving during the summer, at the end of this school year. We would divide the 18 hour drive into 3 days. He went on to say he wasn’t sure how long we’d live there, or if we would be moving back to Utah at all. There were definitely a lot of things that we didn’t want to hear.
“But what about all my friends here?” Jordan asked.
“You’ll have plenty of time to make new friends when we get there. You’ll have part of the summer to make friends, and it will be a fresh school year so you won’t have troubles fitting in.” My dad responded.
By this point Jordan was pretty much in tears. My older brother Jake and I really felt bad for him. While this would be the first time that any of us had moved, it seemed especially hard for him, being only seven years old at the time.
After our short interrogation with my parents about the details of the move, the rest of dinner went by relatively quietly. Nobody really had anything to say. Nothing we could say seemed to really matter at that point. My brothers and I were too focused (or maybe frightened is a better word) on the news that our parents had told us.
The final couple months of the school year were weird for me. You’d think that most people would try to spend as much time as possible with their friends because it was their final chances. To me, however, it was different. I didn’t play with friends as much because it almost seemed to me like it didn’t matter. I knew that at the end of this year, I wasn’t going to be here anyway, so why make relocating harder than it needed to be?
The next thing we knew, the school year was over. This marked the time that we would start packing up all of our belongings. What seemed like a very short time later, the whole house had been transformed into endless stacks of boxes. We spent our last night in Utah eating McDonalds in sleeping bags at our empty house in Sandy. The next morning we would get up early to start the journey.
We divided our traveling into three days, as previously planned. It was the most time I have ever had to sit in a car in my entire life. When we arrived in North Dakota my parents informed us that our home wasn’t done being built yet, and we’d have to spend a few days longer in a hotel. We did, however get to go look at our house. That was a really fun experience for me as an eleven year old. Looking through every room at the house was surprisingly exciting. We decided which room we would all get, and waited impatiently for the time we could move our stuff in.
Finally the day arrived; the day when we could finally start moving into our new home. After spending what seemed like countless days in a hotel, we couldn’t wait to move into our house. After driving the short distance to our house, we saw the moving truck there too. It was the same one that was at our house in Sandy. We started to unload all of our stuff. The piles of boxes, once again, seemed endless. However, after we finished unloading the truck, my brothers and I were still excited to begin organizing and setting up our new rooms. That step didn’t take long. Before we knew it, each of our rooms was set up to our liking. I was really excited to be in a new house, with a new environment. Jake and I had rooms right next to each other in the basement. We were the two that had bedrooms in the basement, and we felt like we owned it. Jake and I grew up together and have always been best buds. Although we missed our friends, we were happy in our new place. It was exciting to have a change-up.
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