Originally appeared in The News & Observer:
Teetering about 40 feet above the Guyandotte River, the brick-red shack looks one storm away from going for a swim, or at least it always seems that way to me when I drive down U.S. 60 in Huntington, W.Va., and find the sorry thing still clinging to the bank.
Hubcaps hang from its peeling sides and spill out onto the grass, adding a metal glint to the litter along a highway that too many boarded-up businesses and weed-choked eyesores call home.
I don't know the Hubcap Boys, as I've taken to calling the proprietors, but their little stretch of road somehow symbolizes for me why I can never go home.
In the two years it took my husband to get his electronics degree in West Virginia, there were two jobs in his field posted in the local classifieds. Two years, two jobs.
Every Sunday in The News & Observer, there are 15 positions in his field. Every Sunday.
And that's the reality of why some of the 24,000 people who settle in the Triangle every year pack up their lives, choke out their goodbyes to their friends and families, and travel the road of opportunity to North Carolina.
Bigger and better jobs entice plenty of people, but just the hope of any decent job motivates many.
Economic realities, however, do little to soothe a shredded heart when your mother-in-law talks wistfully of realizing, now that your new niece lives five miles away from her in West Virginia, how much she's missed your children.
Or when you drive to the Chinese buffet after church on Sundays and sit among strangers, knowing that your grandparents and your brother and his wife are sitting in your mom's seafoam-green dining room having her roast beef with gravy and perfect iced tea.
Or when you sit on a dusty dance floor watching the sashays of your intent 4-year-old angel child, wondering whether her grandparents will ever see her in a ballet recital, a school play, a band concert.
My husband and I were just two of the 45,791 people who migrated to North Carolina in 1987. There were more than 73,000 newcomers in 1994. In every nook of the Triangle, in each cookie-cutter subdivision, are people thankful to be basking in the myriad niceties but hurting nonetheless in their kinless anonymity.
Envy is not an emotion I know intimately, but I flirt with it routinely when one of my best friends talks of meeting her dad for bagels in Cary and the other of taking her children into Raleigh to buy shoes with her mother-in-law, who's paying.
Yes, North Carolina has brought me some friends I love fiercely, but it takes years to cultivate that "comfortability" of family, to lift the shades on all of the little windows that show who we really are. It's well worth the effort, but so few people these days seem to have the time or the emotional wherewithal to get past the weather and basketball.
When I start wallowing in my dreams of West Virginia - living where I can pop in for lunch at my mom's restaurant, where my in-laws can chuckle at the daily language hilarities of my 20-month-old instead of marveling at his height after a four-month interval, where I can drop off the kids at Dad's and go looking at wallpaper for an afternoon by myself - it's my husband's dream I cling to.
In his dream, we live in a state where our children can grow up, go to fine universities - and stay when they graduate! They won't have to leave, as we did, just to survive.
So I'll let my thoughts of a red shack on a depressing highway mingle with his shiny, white dream and paint for myself a rosy, pink future of never having to mourn the casualties of distance with my children and grandchildren.
(Burgetta Wheeler is assistant news editor.)
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