The Filler Episode City
You know how every single time we move I wax philosophically about how one of these times my heart will actually be ready to leave when the time comes? (Pop on the links right quick if you need a refresher: Alaska, Japan, Las Vegas, Texas, and DC.) Well the gods that be looked down, said heard and understood, and made my odd little wish come true with a relocation to Montgomery, Alabama.
Now don’t get me wrong, Montgomery is not the worst place we could have been sent (not by a long shot), but it’s also not the best… especially when you look at all of the places we’ve called home so far. Montgomery simply was just… there. It was the filler episode. You know what I’m talking about — you’re watching this great TV series with banger after banger and then halfway through the season you get the filler episode. It’s not really bad, per se, it’s just that nothing really happens. I guess it serves some purpose by way of character development, but was it really necessary?
That was the #vibe of our less than a year of living in Montgomery. Both Mark and I felt unchallenged in our careers, and when we punched out for the weekend, we were greeted with a whole lot of nothing to do. Sure, this was absolutely exacerbated by COVID closures, but not really. And so we spent many nights, days and weekends walking loops around our neighborhood asking what the hell were we doing here.
As one of Mark’s coworkers put it (who lives in Birmingham, by the way), “you’re living in the seventh best city in Alabama.” I’ll take a pause here while you, gentle reader, try to even think of six other cities in Alabama. And now you understand what living in Montgomery was like.
Of course there were some things to do, and we did them as everything started to fully reopen in the spring. We went to the double A baseball games and did the hikes nearby (it’s hard to have a “summit” without mountains). We took in and learned from the painful history of this city, which is the most worthwhile thing to do in Montgomery and I highly recommend you make time for all of EJI museums if you ever find yourself here, specifically The National Memorial for Peace and Justice.
Once we found out we would spend the second half of 2021 and beyond in Germany, life in Montgomery got a little easier. As so often happens, we were able to start seeing the silver lining. Is it better to spend a wash of a year due to a pandemic in a place where there is so much to do but everything is closed, or in a place where there wasn’t much going on to begin with? We landed on the latter, remembering how sad it was to be in DC not able to go to the museums, restaurants… anything during quarantine.
From a personal perspective, the lack of entertainment led me to deep dive into my hobbies. One of my friends recently asked what my favorite part of living here was, and it took everything in me to not blurt out that it allowed me to get decently good at knitting. Everywhere else we’ve lived so far, I could easily spout off what I loved about the city — the scenery, the community, the food, the entertainment… Instead, I focused on our trips to Birmingham and Huntsville, because camping and brunching in both cities was a particular bright spot this year.