Why We Left the Philadelphia Suburbs for Alabama
“How on earth did you end up here?”
That’s the typical response when I meet someone and tell them we recently moved here and are originally from outside of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Which is fair, because we now live in Centre, Alabama, and it honestly couldn’t be more different than the Philly Burbs.
It’s also a loaded answer.
So pull up a seat.
A few years back, my husband’s niece got married, and her new husband decided to attend lineman school in Northwest Georgia. They absolutely fell in love with the area. They were originally from Delaware, so hearing they were moving to rural Georgia was pretty shocking.
A few years later, her parents followed them and settled in a tiny little town on a huge piece of land, also in Northwest Georgia.
At the time, it never crossed my mind that their story would eventually become ours.
In 2023, our daughter Gloria spent quite a bit of time in the hospital. (That’s a story for another day.) During that time, my brother-in-law and sister-in-law FaceTimed her constantly. They read books together, laughed together, and somehow managed to make long hospital days a little brighter.
Their relationship became incredibly close, so when they invited Gloria and Grace to spend a few weeks with them that summer, saying yes was easy.
The girls absolutely loved it.
That summer my husband, Craig, went down to visit for the first time too.
He.
Was.
Hooked.
You see, in the South, everything slows down.
Everything.
The way people move.
The way traffic rolls down Main Street.
Even the way words fall out of people’s mouths, slowly and drawn out in that gorgeous Southern twang.
Slow.
Wait…
Slow?
What’s slow?
We weren’t slow people.
We were constantly moving. Constantly running. To work. To school. To pick up the kids. To clean the house. To grocery shop. To another appointment.
Hurry up.
Hurry.
Hurry.
Hurry.
To us, slow felt like taking the deepest breath after holding it for years.
Craig came home talking about it constantly.
He loved the mountains.
He loved the people.
He loved that life didn’t seem to revolve around rushing from one thing to the next.
For the next year, I heard about moving south at least once a month.
But I was pregnant with my sixth child (our eighth between us), exhausted physically and mentally, running my own DIY studio, homeschooling, taking care of our home, and trying to keep everything afloat while Craig worked long hours in a demanding onsite catering business.
The thought of moving eight people 750 miles away?
It felt impossible.
Later that year, we visited for Thanksgiving.
That’s when I fell in love too.
Not with a particular town.
Not with a house.
I fell in love with the air.
You know how people always say the South is slower?
They’re right.
The silence that hangs over a Southern porch first thing in the morning speaks to my soul more than any podcast I used to cram into my ears while rushing out the door back home.
The sky was so clear you could actually see the stars.
The mornings felt still.
Peaceful.
For the first time in a long time, I wasn’t thinking about what came next.
I was just…there.
Still, I couldn’t wrap my head around making such a drastic move.
What would happen to my business?
What would Craig do for work?
My family is in Pennsylvania. What would that look like?
Craig’s two oldest boys from his first marriage also live in Pennsylvania with their mom. How would we continue building those relationships?
We’d have to sell our house.
Coordinate a move.
Pack up eight lives.
My mind was spinning with every reason it would be hard.
Another year went by.
Our sixth baby was born.
The girls went back for another successful summer visit.
Craig fell even more in love with Northwest Georgia.
Honestly though, I think he had fallen in love with the South itself.
When you drive from Pennsylvania to Northwest Georgia, you spend hours on Interstate 81.
Every single trip, somewhere around Tennessee, something changes.
The best way I know how to explain it is that the air shifts.
I know that sounds strange.
But it does.
The air feels different.
It smells different.
It almost breathes differently.
Every single time we made that drive, I felt a weight lift off my chest right around then.
I watched how our family acted when we were there.
The kids spent more time outside.
We laughed more.
Craig smiled more.
He seemed lighter.
Happier.
More and more, our house in Pennsylvania started to feel like a prison cell.
We had outgrown it years before, but the cost of living in Pennsylvania made moving into something larger nearly impossible.
Housing.
Utilities.
Gas.
Property taxes.
Everything was expensive.
I kept saying, “One day.”
One day we’ll move.
One day we’ll have more space.
One day we’ll slow down.
Then one morning I realized…
What are we waiting for?
It’s going to be hard now.
It’ll be hard next year.
It’ll be hard five years from now.
So if it’s going to be hard anyway…
Why not now?
I turned to Craig and said, “Let’s go. Let’s do it. What are we waiting for?”
Once I said those words…
It was game on.
You see, we’re both people with hyper-attentive ADHD.
When we focus on something…
We REALLY focus.
The following month became an absolute whirlwind.
Phone interviews.
Virtual interviews.
Research.
Planning.
Craig applied to every job that made sense within about an hour of where we thought we’d rent.
I was adamant that we rent first.
We knew absolutely nothing about the area, and buying immediately felt like too much.
A month later, Craig drove south for in-person interviews.
He accepted a position with an up-and-coming company that had room for growth and a product he could genuinely be proud of.
He loves solving problems.
This checked every box.
For reference…
We decided to move around July 20.
Craig started his new job September 1.
That’s how fast everything happened.
He moved ahead of us while I stayed behind in Pennsylvania with the kids.
He was working ten to twelve hour days during training.
I was pregnant again, homeschooling, packing our entire life, and trying to get our house ready to sell.
It.
Was.
Hard.
Looking back, I honestly don’t know how we did it.
I painted almost the entire house.
Painted kitchen cabinets.
Installed a new backsplash.
Replaced countertops.
Installed a new sink.
Cleaned.
Organized.
Packed.
Decluttered.
Somewhere along the way, my kids became my unpaid handymen.
We jokingly called our first homeschool unit “Life Skills.”
Everyone learned how to use a paintbrush.
Everyone learned how to pack a moving box.
Everyone understood that every single inch of space on that moving truck mattered because not everything was coming with us.
We weren’t just preparing for a move.
We were preparing for a completely different life.
We spent enough time in our rental in Georgia to get a lay of the land, welcome our newest baby, and begin searching for a place to put down permanent roots.
We found the best Realtor.
Then something unexpected happened.
We realized we were only about fifteen minutes from the Alabama state line.
Funny enough…
Alabama had never been part of the plan.
I mean…
Who moves to Alabama?
The only thing I really knew about Alabama was the famous college football rivalry.
(Roll Tide, by the way.)
But the more we looked, the more it made sense.
We could still be within forty minutes of Craig’s work.
Property taxes were dramatically lower.
We could afford significantly more house.
We could be part of the Weiss Lake community without paying lakefront prices.
Craig dreamed of having lots of land to explore.
I cared more about the house itself.
He kept encouraging me to look at one particular house.
I kept saying no because it only had about two acres, and I knew he wanted much more land.
Finally, I gave in.
I figured we’d just look.
The second I pulled into the driveway, Enzo ran across the yard and through the front door like he already owned the place.
I hadn’t even made it inside before I knew this house was different.
The kitchen.
The windows.
The arches.
The incredible character.
It was built in the late 1960s, and it absolutely screams mid-century design.
You simply cannot recreate that kind of character.
Especially today, when so many homes are built quickly, cheaply, and all look exactly the same.
Yes, the size was a little overwhelming at first.
But then I started imagining our life here.
Guests staying with us.
The kids spreading out instead of climbing over one another.
Coffee in the courtyard.
Opening the sliding glass door from our bedroom early in the morning while everyone else was still asleep.
Standing there in my robe as the sun came up.
Listening to…
Nothing.
Just birds.
Just the breeze.
Just quiet.
And that’s when I knew.
This wasn’t just another house.
This was home.
So…
That’s how a family from outside Philadelphia ended up in Centre, Alabama.
We didn’t move because we hated Pennsylvania.
Pennsylvania will always hold people and memories we love.
We moved because we wanted a different kind of life.
More room.
More adventures.
More afternoons outside.
More peace.
More breathing room.
More opportunities to say yes.
Less rushing.
Less surviving.
More living.
Turns out Alabama may just be the South’s best-kept secret.
And for our family…
It was exactly what we didn’t know we were looking for.