It is summer 2020 it's in the midst of the covid pandemic. Now that we are working from home we have plenty of time on our hands. Being locked down is making us stir crazy so every day we take a walk to Lincoln Park, a short 15 min. walk from our apartment in Jersey City. We have lived here for 25 years now, but we will cover our personal info under "about us". So it's another blistering hot summer day in July, we were perched in our usual spot next to the pond under a weeping willow tree on an old tattered blanket we saved just for such occasions. We had both brought a book to read but were having trouble concentrating that day so we were talking about life, life in Jersey City to be exact. The pandemic has a funny way of making you think about deeper things in life like our existence and our achievements. We are no longer young kids seeking adventures but wiser now and priorities change. Of course, this was not our first conversation about this but this time it was different, it was real, the possibilities seemed within our reach. What was our future to look like? only we have the power to shape that. We had discussed moving on many occasions but this seemed like something in the distant future when we are old and grey in our golden years, but today was different, today we took action.

This action started with making a list of places we wanted to live based on 4 factors, weather, as we longed to escape the long cold winters of the east coast, quality of life, safety, and affordability. This began many long hours of research to narrow down our final choice.

The list went something like this;

Bisby, Arizona

Santa Fe, New Mexico

Marfa, Texas

Missoula, Montana

Laramie, Wyoming

Salt Lake City, Utah

I know this may sound like a random list but first of all, they were places we had either visited in the past and fell in love with or romanticized about living there, several cities were chosen by me as an artist, maybe predictable. After a month or two of intense research, we slowly started crossing cities off of the list one by one for different reasons, the details are not important.

One night as the summer was winding down we were chilling out watching an episode of HGTV's Home Town, if you don't know it, you should, it is a home improvement program staring the most down-to-earth folks, Ben and Erin Napier. It is just one of those shows that you can't miss an episode. The premise of the show is that Ben and Erin help prospective homeowners find a home in Laurel Mississippi as they work to revitalize their hometown back to its original glory. During one episode I had a thought and turned to Ramon, "what about Laurel?" Laurel, why not Laurel neither one of us knew anything about Mississippi or Laurel only what we had seen on T.V. I had driven through Mississippi with my family once as a child I couldn't have been more than 9 or 10 years old. I remember seeing the Mississippi River, to me, Mississippi was a mystery, the Deep South. Ramon had never even been to the south, except for Florida where he lived 25 years ago, but is Florida really the south?