The cornfield outside my kitchen window on a winter evening. Credit: Amy Hatch
By Amy L. Hatch
When my husband called and told me that we were moving to Chambana, I cried.
It was just nine months after we’d bought our first house in Rochester, N.Y. We had a 14-month-old. My sister was planning to move back to our hometown that summer with her family, and my widowed mother lived just five minutes from us.
To say I was dragged here, kicking and screaming, is like saying that World War II was a minor skirmish. I was angry, resentful and not predisposed to liking it here.
My impression of Chambana was no better after spending three hectic days house-hunting in the middle of July. Sweat ran down my back as a Realtor drove us to what seemed like every dilapidated house in town. I shook my head in wonder and frustration, refusing to even go inside some of the homes.
“No,” I said from the car. “Not this one.”
We found a place, on our last day. We turned around and drove the 700 miles back East on my 34th birthday. I was bereft at the idea of leaving everything I knew behind, which is exactly what we did on Aug. 26, 2006.
It isn’t like I hadn’t moved before. When I was 15 my family moved to England, and I spent the late 1980s perfecting my ennui while I listened to The Smiths through my Walkman headphones on the London Underground. Then I spent four years in Boston as an undergraduate.
But London! Boston! And now … Chambana?
Our first year here was hard. Like, maybe-a-commuter-marriage-isn’t-a-bad-idea hard. I hated it with all my heart. I pushed my shopping cart through the aisles at Schnucks cursing the day my husband set foot on campus. I hated my suburban Colonial home with its postage-stamp yard and the ugly brown cornfield out my kitchen window.
I was a hater, and I made no secret of it.
Recently a friend joined me and Laura for lunch in downtown Urbana, not far from Collective Turf where we spend our Friday afternoons working on chambanamoms.com. I told our friend that moving to Chambana is one of the best things that ever happened to me.
I learned independence in a way that I never could have elsewhere. I had no one but my husband to rely on, and so we drew each other even closer. I was a new mother here, navigating the scary high seas of parenting without a lifeboat. I weathered those storms and came out with sturdy sea legs. Our second child, my only son, was born here.
Chambana changed my life forever—and for better.
That’s not to say that I don’t get cranky sometimes and mutter “I just want to go home!” under my breath when confronted with some uniquely Chambanan quirk. But I’m not a hater any more, and thanks to a certain small boy, I will always and forever be a Chambana mom, no matter where we end up.
Chambana, I thank you.
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Amy L. Hatch is a co-founder of chambanamoms.com, and still hates four-way stops. Why, Chambana, why all the four-way stops? You can reach email her at amy@chambanamoms.com.
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