This is an opinion column

I live in a boom town—Huntsville, Alabama. New neighborhoods grow every week and subdivisions sprout like mushrooms. If you want to take a drive in the country, you’d better hurry up. Apartment buildings rise, each one higher than the next, changing the skyline.

So how do newcomers— and they come from all over—settle in, meet people, find their way in these boom times? I met a young mother at my neighborhood walking track who was trying to figure all this out as her children ran around.

About lap two of my walk, I heard her talking to a couple of joggers. They’d stopped to tag team their toddlers, both racing down the painted lanes and screaming about who’d win when they got to the place where the track looped back again.

The adults were dressed in fancy jog-wear, the women with pony tails pulled back and the man with a sporty tee shirt and expensive running shoes. He apologized to me as the kids whizzed by, telling them to slow down. He was shouting to the wind. Don’t hurt the old people, he was thinking, and then he turned back to the woman talking to his wife.

She was new here, she was explaining, and had some questions for them. She’d moved to Alabama from California, which is like moving from one world to another. Her family came for the good jobs here, and she wanted to know the usual: best schools, names of pediatricians, a good place to board their dogs when they flew back home to visit family.

Home was now in a galaxy far away. And it takes a long time to realize that the new town you’ve moved to eventually becomes home. Or not, depending on how things go. Maybe home is a state of mind, not an actual state. You can live somewhere for 30 years and still miss the way the air smelled back home or the way the waves crashed on the California shore.

A friend of mine said she was shocked to move to the south from the Pacific Northwest. People were too nosy, she said. They asked her religion. They asked her party affiliation. They assumed it was the same as theirs. She wasn’t a Baptist or a Buddhist, and it was none of their business, anyway. Eventually she moved back west. It was her true home.

As I lapped around the track, I remembered being new to this place before it was my home. When I drive by the house we lived in then, I see a family’s trampoline in the backyard with lazy cats sleeping on it. I see a young mother unloading groceries and keeping a toddler out of the road. I hear my German neighbors speaking in their native tongue except when they talk to my family and switch to English, and I hear my other neighbors welcoming us with the Alabama drawl I speak with now.

I see the street get busier with cars that whizzed by, ignoring the speed limit and taking out two of our cats who tried to cross the road but didn’t make it. I see the neighborhood children walking in a tight pack on Halloween, the big ones holding the hands of the little ones.

Eventually the parents of the children became our friends. The neighborhood roads were the ones we traveled every single day. We knew every pot hole. The neighborhood grocery store was where we ran into our children’s teachers and coaches. And the people we met at work, a few of them, became friends that we grilled out with on weekends or went to church with on Sundays. So new friends became old friends and some have moved away and some have passed away. But it all took time.

I want to tell the newcomer to hold on until she finds her place. One day, years from now, she may be the older woman walking on that same track outside of the school her children and maybe her grandchildren attended. She may feel at home or she may still do some California dreaming. But if she’s here, she’ll probably have advice for any newcomers she meets along the track. Look at me, she might say, I used to be from California, but now I’m from Huntsville. So are my children and their families, and so are most of my friends. We found out that we could make a home here. Maybe you will, too. It just takes time.

Beth Thames | [email protected]