When we decided to move to Texas, I thought I understood what I was getting into.
I was wrong.
I remember the drive down. After what felt like forever on the road, we finally crossed the state line on I-10.
I looked out the window and thought, Yeah. Here we are.
What I did not realize was that I still had another five hours of driving before reaching San Antonio.
Five hours.
Back in Michigan, crossing a state line usually meant you were almost there. Maybe another hour. Maybe less.
Not Texas.
In Texas, crossing the state line simply meant you had begun the Texas portion of the trip.
The farther we drove, the more I began to understand just how enormous the state really was. The highways stretched endlessly toward horizons that never seemed to get any closer.
Texas changed my understanding of what far away meant.
When we finally arrived in San Antonio, we moved into a spare room that had been built inside my brother-in-law's garage.
It was not much, but it was a place to start.
We had uprooted our lives and moved halfway across the country. We did not have much money. We did not have a house. We did not have much of a plan beyond trying to build a better life.
The garage room would have to do.
One night, while sleeping there, I woke up in the middle of the night feeling something on my chest.
At first I could not figure out what it was.
Then my eyes focused.
A baby opossum was lying on my chest, only inches from my face.
My brain was not fully awake, but instinct took over.
I quickly put my hand between the opossum and my face so it could not bite me, then flicked it onto the floor.
The moment it landed, the room exploded into movement.
I watched its mother and several siblings scurry across the garage floor and disappear beneath the gap under the garage door.
I sat there in stunned silence.
Had I really just woken up with an opossum sleeping on my chest?
Apparently I had.
My wife continued sleeping in the garage room.
I spent the next several nights on the couch in the living room.
As strange as the opossum incident was, it was not the only thing that took some getting used to.
Then there were the feeder roads.
Michigan did not have feeder roads. At least nowhere I had ever lived.
The first time I encountered them, I could not understand why there was another road running alongside the highway. Every major freeway seemed to have businesses, traffic lights, restaurants, and gas stations lining roads that followed the freeway for miles.
Everyone else acted as though this was perfectly normal.
I spent months accidentally taking wrong turns, getting back on highways I meant to leave, and leaving highways I meant to stay on.
Eventually I figured it out.
Then there was the heat.
Nobody had adequately prepared me for the heat.
People used to joke that it was hot enough to cook an egg on the hood of a truck.
I thought they were exaggerating.
They were not.
The first Texas summer felt like opening an oven door and stepping inside. The air itself felt hot. Parking lots shimmered. Steering wheels became untouchable. Door handles burned your hands.
I had never lived anywhere remotely like it.
One day my brother-in-law asked me to take his truck to a repair shop.
He gave me directions and I headed out.
I drove.
And drove.
And drove some more.
Eventually I called him.
"Where the heck is this place?" I asked.
He laughed and asked where I was.
I told him.
"You've only gone about halfway."
Halfway.
I could not believe it.
The funny part was that I had not driven halfway across Texas.
I had not even driven halfway across San Antonio.
That was another lesson Texas taught me.
Distance was not measured in miles.
Distance was measured in time.
Around that time, I was talking often with my brother Tom back in Michigan.
Tom had always been a large part of my life. When I lived in Michigan, he came over often and became part of my family with my second wife. He loved being at my house. I think it gave him a place where he could feel like part of a family again.
Christian loved having Uncle Tom around.
Tom was the kind of brother who showed up.
One year, for Christian's birthday, I bought him a fishing pole. To help him practice casting safely, I took a hook and put it into a rubber ball. I did not think there was any possibility of it coming off.
It did.
Christian cast the ball over a power line. Tom went to grab it and free it. Christian did not know what to do, so he yanked on the pole.
The ball came loose.
The hook went directly into Tom's thumb.
We liked to drink when Tom came over, and that night I looked at him and said, "We could go to the emergency room, or..."
Then I handed him a pair of vice grips and a beer.
Tom took them, locked the vice grips onto the hook, and tried to pull it out. At first I tried to help, but the hook was really stuck. Eventually I left it up to him. He could feel the pain. He knew where it was.
He took a breath and yanked it out of his thumb.
I followed with antibiotic ointment and several more beers.
That was Tom.
Not many people would handle a fishhook in the thumb that way.
When I told him about our situation in Texas, I also told him about the unfinished addition on my brother-in-law's house. My brother-in-law had hired someone to build it, but the job had never been completed.
Tom was a contractor.
After a while, he packed up his van and drove all the way to Texas to help.
Not for a vacation.
Not because it made financial sense.
He came because his brother needed help.
For a while, things worked.
Tom worked on the addition. I helped when he really needed me. I carried materials, held boards, cleaned up, and did whatever needed doing.
But I was not making any money.
Every hour I spent working on the addition was an hour I was not spending trying to find work.
I was grateful for having a place to stay, but I also felt trapped.
My brother-in-law began talking about what it was costing him to support us. Food. Utilities. The room. The inconvenience.
Maybe there were conversations with my wife that I was not part of.
Maybe there were not.
The truth is I do not know.
What I do know is that the arrangement no longer felt like family helping family. It started to feel like a debt that grew larger every day.
Tom was in a bad middle position.
My brother-in-law saw someone living under his roof.
I saw a man trying desperately to get back on his feet.
Tom saw both.
Looking back, I can understand some of the frustration. My brother-in-law wanted the addition finished. Tom had driven all the way from Michigan to work on it. I wanted to help.
But I also needed to build a future for my family.
Those priorities did not always line up.
Eventually I reached my limit.
I did not have a career waiting for me.
I did not have much money.
What I did have was enough pride to know I needed to stand on my own feet.
So I took the last of my cash and found a temporary job.
Finding work was not easy.
I did not have connections.
I did not know the city.
I barely understood how far apart anything was.
But I needed a paycheck.
Eventually I found one.
It was not glamorous.
It was not my dream job.
It was work.
And at that point, work meant possibility.
For the first time since arriving in Texas, I could see a path forward.
A small apartment.
A place of our own.
A chance to stop being someone else's responsibility.
Tom finished the addition.
I do not think he got much out of the job, at least not financially. He had packed up his van, driven halfway across the country, spent weeks working, and found himself caught in the middle of tensions that were not really his.
I sometimes think he came to Texas to help me.
Instead, he ended up helping everyone.
That was Tom.
If there was work to be done, he did it.
If someone needed help, he showed up.
After the addition was finished, Tom stayed with us for a while longer.
I liked having him there.
For the first time since moving to Texas, I had a piece of home nearby.
But life has a way of moving people in different directions.
I enjoyed having him there.
Not everyone felt the same way.
Eventually Tom packed up his things, loaded his van, and headed back to Michigan.
Just like that, he was gone.
There was no dramatic ending.
One day he was there.
Then he was not.
For a while I missed having him around.
He had been part of my life for so long that his absence left a space that was hard to describe.
But life kept moving.
I had work.
I had bills.
I had a marriage.
I had a future I was still trying to build.
Texas was no longer just the place I had moved to.
It was becoming the place where I lived.
The place where I worked.
The place where my future would unfold.
For better or worse, I was home.