After I was born, I came home from the hospital to a house on McLeod Street. It wasn’t a long journey. The emergency entrance of the hospital was across the alley from our garage. McLeod Street was sometimes called Main Street by local people and as a child, I remember trying to correct those who called it Main Street. “The name of the street is McLeod!” I would declare. When I was in elementary school our family acquired a property with a cabin by the river. That property is still in my family. Its address has changed over the years from East Highway 10 to Old Highway 10 and now the official address is Big Timber Loop Road. I guess it would be accurate to say that had lived on a street, a highway and a road by the time I went to college.

My college address and our first address after we married was Poly Drive, so I added a new name for the strip of pavement on which you drive to get to our home. After a year of marriage, we moved to Chicago to attend theological seminary. In Chicago, we had two different addresses, both on Woodlawn Avenue. Street, highway, road, drive, and now avenue - I was collecting names.

From seminary we moved into a parsonage. It was on south second avenue, so we retained the same designation for the roadway. After seven years we moved again. This move was to the first home that we were purchasing. It was on Kipling Road. We didn’t get a new descriptor for the pavement, but we had collected quite a stream of names: McLeod, Ten, Poly, Woodlawn, 2nd, Kipling - the collection was growing.

After a decade, we made the move to the address where we lived for the longest of our lives so far. For 25 years our address was Waxwing Lane. At the time we moved into that house it was not within the city limits. It was later annexed, but for quite a while, we enjoyed country living. Our subdivision was called “Countryside.” I don’t know if others would see it that way, but we felt like we were moving the right direction. We’d gone from a drive to an avenue, from an avenue to a street, from a street to a road, and finally arrived on a lane.

The streets in that subdivision were all named after birds. The namesake of our lane is a medium-sized bird that we often saw visit our yard. The birds aren’t the brightest, like the Tanagers, namesakes of the street that led to Waxwing Lane, but they are still showy, with brown, gray and yellow. Some of them have a bit of pink or red as well. Waxwings eat berries, so they didn’t often nest in our neighborhood, but preferred creek bottoms where the chokecherries grew. Nonetheless, they would flock to our feeders during part of the year when they were traveling around and looking for potential nesting sites. I always thought it would be poetic to have a waxwing nest in our yard on Waxwing Lane, but to my knowledge it never happened.

Upon retirement, we moved again. We decided to rent a home for a year to explore our new area. It would, we thought, give us time to explore the new territory and select an address that was just right for us. For the last year, we’ve been living on East Highland Avenue. Back to the days when we last were paying rent on Woodlawn Avenue. We hadn’t really done our homework and we didn’t understand the nature of the rapidly increasing price of homes in the area. As it turned out, the year of renting was pretty expensive for us. The rent was high and the price of homes continued to escalate. One home that we looked at while shopping had increased by over 20% in just one year. That is a lot of increase in equity that we passed up by renting. However, it did turn out that waiting was good for us. At about the same time as we made the move from South Dakota our son and his family made the move from their house on the edge of town to a farm farther away. Had we purchased a home a year ago, we might have ended up more than 20 miles from our grandchildren. We also found our new church home much closer to the farm than the house where we are currently living.

Yesterday, we signed the papers to purchase a new home for us, so we will be adding to the list of addresses. By the end of this month we will have moved to Clamdigger Drive. We’re back to a drive once again, the same as our first home when we married. Clamdigger, however, surprises us. Having spent all of our lives up until the last year living a long ways from the ocean, we’re moving into an oceanside community on a street with a distinctly oceanside name. I don’t think there are any Clamdigger drives in South Dakota. The address is very convenient for us, just a couple of miles from the house where our son and his family live. They have a barn where I have a shop, and they have land for gardening and other outdoor activities that are a bit limited on our small property. Besides we really enjoy our grandchildren and being with their family. We’ll be spending a fair amount of time at their place.

It’s been quite a journey from street to highway to drive to avenue to street to road to lane to avenue and now to drive once again. And that doesn’t count the fact that we lived in two different apartments in one building and three different apartments next door during our four years in Chicago. We’ve moved quite a bit, though 25 years in the same home in South Dakota got us out of the practice. We’re practicing once again, with the boxes starting to fill.

We are hoping to settle in at our new address, but we know that if we are like most people we have known, there are more moves in our future. We are at the age where the progression from house to townhouse to apartment to assisted living can begin. For now it seems to us that we are making the right move.

I guess, I should learn how to dig clams. After all we will be within walking distance of the warmest bay on the Washington coast where clam digging is a way of life for many. If you’re going to live on the street, perhaps you should learn the practice. Time will tell.