My parents are leaving Silverton.

My parents are moving this weekend; they're leaving Silverton and moving to Keizer. I feel like I shouldn't really care so much, but I really do care a lot. I'm upset, I'm sad, I'm mourning a loss in my life.

I don't know if I'm really going to miss the house that I lived in with my parents for 13 years. Yes, there are plenty of memories there, so many crucial moments in my life that happened within those walls. But the town itself is so much more a part of who I am.

I can mark so many moments in my life by age and place, almost all of it in Silverton.

Five years old: We start going to Silverton Friends Church. We drive every week from Salem to Silverton to worship with a congregation that becomes like our extended family. These people become to me like my aunts and uncles, grandparents and cousins. They are the people who know me and love me the most in the whole world.

Nine years old: I start going to Silverton Christian School. It’s at our church, so it already feels like home. It’s not perfect, and sometimes I wish I wasn’t there, but it’s small, it’s safe, and it’s familiar.

Ten years old: We finally move to Silverton. We’re home all the way now. Everything in my life fits together in one neat package: home, school, church, and friends, all in Silverton.

Skip a few years down the road past middle school and high school. I’m going to school dances and singing in the choir. I write for the school paper, and I get my first job at the library. I graduate from high school and start planning my future.

Even the beginning of my future starts in Silverton.

Twenty-three years old: My boyfriend takes me to the park so we can take pictures. As we’re walking through the park, he stops me on the bridge across Silver Creek, gets down on his knees, and asks me if I will marry him. I cry, I say yes, I hold him, and I am the happiest I have ever been in my entire life.


Still twenty-three years old: February 3^rd, 2007, Craig and I get married at the Assembly of God church across from my high school and just a few blocks away from the house where I’ve lived with my parents for thirteen years. Now that I’m married, I’ll live in Albany, but I can always come home to Silverton, to my parents’ house, to all the people and places that have been my life.

Except now my parents are moving.