This is the 4th and final article honoring Fidelity month. The article is regarding fidelity to community. It is written by Melody Warnick.
The last night of the family reunion, my husband, Quinn, and I were sitting around the fire pit discussing our plans for flying back home to Virginia when his brother said, “If you lived in Idaho, you’d already be home.”
To be fair, he’d been upfront that his ulterior motive for hosting the family reunion near Boise was to display Idaho’s true glory and thus convince us, the East Coast holdouts, to move there. My 80-year-old mother-in-law’s plaintive requests have been even more straightforward: “When are you going to come back to Utah?” she regularly asks Quinn. “I want my son to live closer to me.”
Between us, my husband and I have a total of seven parents and siblings, all but one of whom are scattered across the West from Arizona to Utah, Idaho to Oregon—which makes us and our ridiculous insistence on living in Virginia the burr in the saddle of family togetherness. The longer we live here, the more galling it becomes to certain family members. Like, Come on, it was funny at first, but now the joke is over.
To read more: Building Zion in The Backyard: Learning To Love Where You Are
