Go west -- or north or east or south; you decide

My wife and I have moved more than 20 times in our half-century together. But we are spoiled. Nearly half of that half-century has been spent right here in Cape Girardeau. We have been in our house 18 years, the longest we've ever lived anywhere in our lives.

So why is our impending move to a smaller house with all kinds of amenities such a struggle for us? Have we spent the past 18 years turning soft? Surely it's not because we are -- how to put this best -- 18 years older than we were for our last move.

A brief recap of the Sullivan residential history:

When we were married (I got a whole weekend off from work; my wife would start teaching in a couple of months), we lived in a three-room attic apartment [1] reached by an outdoor stairway.

We moved to a garden apartment [2] with two bedrooms and central air conditioning.

From there we moved into the split-level three-bedroom house [3] we purchased. So far, all our homes were in the Kansas City area.

Then we moved to a one-bedroom garden apartment [4] in Dallas.

A few months later we moved across the courtyard to a two-bedroom apartment [5] in the same complex.

Heading north and east, we moved to New York, to a studio apartment [6] in Manhattan, half a block from Central Park and across the street from The Dakota, a well-appointed residential hulk occupied by the likes of John Lennon and made famous by the movie "Rosemary's Baby."

That was all paid for by Dow Jones & Co., my employer, while we looked for a permanent apartment, which we found on Staten Island [7] just up the hill from the ferry terminal. We had a fantastic postcard view of lower Manhattan from our living room. We could see from the Brooklyn Bridge on the East River all the way to the George Washington Bridge on the Hudson River. We watched the twin towers of the World Trade Center sprout above the magnificent skyline.

Then came Idaho, which was about as west as you could go from New York. "There be dragons!" our New York friends warned us, especially those who had never crossed the Hudson in their entire lives. Really.

In Idaho, we lived in Moscow in what was one of the original farmhouses [8] built when the town was first settled.

A while later we bought the two-bedroom house [9] next door. We thought the move across the lawn would be a snap. It was our hardest move ever.

Because of grandparents, we next wound up in Nevada, Missouri. We moved our worldly possessions into the two-car garage [10] of publisher Ben Weir while we looked for a house to buy.

That house was a two-story, three-bedroom Sears kit house [11] with gambrel roof and a pentagonal porch. There's a house very much like it on Middle Street here in Cape Girardeau.

Next came Independence, Missouri, where we bought a three-bedroom house [12] a half-block off the original Santa Fe Trail, which officially started on the square in Independence, just a couple of miles away. The park was Santa Fe, the elementary school was Santa Fe -- there was a lot of Santa Fe going on.

A year later we moved to a recently restored 1913 two-story house [13] in Maryville, Missouri. We stayed in Maryville eight years, which was a record at the time.

From Maryville we moved to Blue Springs, Missouri, next to Independence. We lived in a town house [14] for several months while building a house [15] in a new subdivision that bordered the thousands of acres surrounding Lake Jacomo and Blue Springs Lake.

West. Again. We headed for Topeka, Kansas, to a three-bedroom ranch-style house [16] built right after World War II. It was constructed of concrete blocks, inside and out. The builder saw a future for a concrete-block building boom, but it never happened. By the way, our house in Moscow was all concrete blocks too.

From Topeka we moved to Cape and into the lovely apartment [17] on the second floor of the newspaper building. We were looking for a house to buy, but it took three years until we found the house [18] where we currently reside. The 18 years we've been in this house seem like a much shorter time, but the calendar doesn't lie.

After 18 years, all the trees and shrubs and flowering bushes and other plants in our yard finally have come into their own, thanks in large part to the spectacular spring we've enjoyed this year.

The raised garden bed, however, is bare, except for the hardy dandelions and water grass that would like to take over. Why is this? Well, maybe our move to a house with all those amenities gives you a clue. I give up. The deer win. They can chomp to their hearts' content. I will not fight back. We're moving. Now the deer will be someone else's problem.

(I think I have some idea now of how Ukrainians feel after being invaded by Russian troops, who leave behind a path of destruction any Missouri whitetail deer would be proud of.)

So. Off we go, sometime this summer, to new digs, and our third home in Cape Girardeau. Now there's a new record.

And I hope it's the last.

Joe Sullivan is the retired editor of the Southeast Missourian.