My Roots Run Deep

There's this thing called Blogtember and I'm doing it. Which means I'm alive. And blogging.
And glad to be back. kinda.

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Day 1/20 - Describe where, or what, you came from. The people, the places, and/or the factors that make up who you are.

{taken this summer at my mother's family plot in cincinnati.} 

I come from teachers.
Professors. Musicians. Travelers.
People who are passionate about their work and followed their callings.

I come from people who care- for the world, for others, for the effects of their actions.
People who have strong morals and values ingrained. Not because they fear a higher power; but because they simply know what's right and wrong.

From a mother who taught my son to stop and smell the flowers (he does. always.) and a father who filled our house with piano sonatas when he arrived home late.

I come from a family I love; a family that sits together for dinner with moments of silence beforehand; a family whose traditions and ways I strive to incorporate into my own.

I come from a city centered on colorful birds and blue crabs. Where water is a way of life and greenery is abundant. Where going to the track means horses, not cars. A city with pockets of good and pockets of bad. There's love, families, and pride, but also murder, drugs, and crime. It doesn't come with a user's manual; it's not always an easy place. But once you find the beauty that you know you earned, it's hard to shake. I proudly say that I come from Baltimore.

Yet I chose another life. One full of Texas sun and heat, with a husband who thinks Saturdays are for football and works to live not lives to work. A tech-junkie who has trouble disconnecting. A man who gives our baby his bath and bottle every night and cleans up the kitchen after I cook. He's around for the long haul and all the lovely little moments in our days, and I couldn't have chosen better. I settled on a clean city, spit and polished, where grass doesn't grow because there's a drought and thirty-eight murders in one year is a record. Where music and horned cattle are king. A city that I love to the core, am happy to call home, and balances my other in the best ways.

But those roots, they sure run deep. They made me find diversity in a city so vastly white, living in a neighborhood not sheltered by an HOA or backyards and fences. They lead me to a crowd of purple on Sunday afternoons. They make me turn on NPR's Fresh Air as I'm chopping vegetables. They take me on outdoor morning adventures with Declan to find acorns and feathers. Just as I wouldn't take back the choices that brought me here, I am also so thankful for the gifts that I had no say in.

LIVE THE MURRAYED LIFE

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