In the small communities throughout Marion County, there is a popular theme shared by young folks gearing up to go out into the world. Many kids resent their hometown and can’t wait to venture out into the vast world of the unknown, imagining a multitude of exciting possibilities.

Imagining that beyond that city limit sign lays a solution to all of their problems. Imagining that everything is better where the town is bigger and the people are strangers. Imagining that they won’t ever truly be successful or fulfilled until they brush the hometown dust off their coattails and hit the road.

I had many of these notions growing up. I also possessed an immense amount of pride and comfort in my hometown of Peabody. Wondering why I needed to go searching for something elsewhere, when I never knew what it was that people were truly looking for. I returned to the notion that if something isn’t broke, don’t fix it.

After graduating, I stuck around my familiar ZIP code for several years, until I met a man who eventually became my husband. Now it wasn’t just my own wants and feelings that motivated where I lived or what I did with my life. I had stayed around mostly because that’s where I felt the most comfortable and felt I had the most support. And to be honest, maybe because I was a little hesitant to step out of my comfort zone.

After vacationing in Maine during the summer of 2015, we fell in love with the atmosphere and salty air of the east coast, and decided to pack the moving truck and hit the road so my husband could chase dreams of becoming a lobsterman, and I could finally experience life out of the only environment I had ever known.

There are positives and negatives to many aspects of life. After spending over a year away from our families and friends, and some potholes in our adventure’s humble road that couldn’t have been expected, the negatives of living 1,800 miles away from “home” eventually outweighed the positives.

Through this experience, I learned that life has a way of returning you to avenues that are simply supposed to be there, whether they seem relevant at the time or not.

After living back home for two short months, we went to Jamaica on a vacation that had been planned for almost two years. We had the time of our lives, soaking up the Caribbean sun, relaxing on the beach, and discovering a new culture.

However, when the week was over I once again found myself yearning for that Peabody city limit sign and the single stop light at the four-way, and it caused me to stumble into a bit of an epiphany.

The anonymity of living far away doesn’t outweigh being able to invite my family over for dinner on a whim. The new possibilities of a community you are unfamiliar with don’t prevail over the recognizable smiles of passers-by you meet on the street. Regardless of the motivation behind relocating, beautiful scenery, or new adventures, home will always be sweet home. At the end of the day, I have discovered that a sense of being “successful” can only happen internally, regardless of physical location.

— PAIGE CARR