For almost 40 years, visiting my family meant packing an overnight bag.
In 1976, I left my hometown, Columbia, Tenn., for college. Although I've never lived outside the Volunteer State as an adult, I've also never shared a city with a close relative except for a brief period about 10 years ago when my late mother lived in a nursing home here.
The separation from family was never a big deal except when our two boys were infants. My wife and I both work, and we were envious of couples who had close family members in town to help with baby-sitting and car-pooling.
Now that has changed.
Earlier this year, my sister, Lee Ann - a.k.a. Aunt Lee-Lee - moved into a bungalow about 10 minutes from our house, along with her two 150-pound Great Danes, Mabel and Gertrude (named for our maternal grandmother and her cousin), and her cat, Miss Ida Lou, named after our eccentric, late great-aunt who used to cheat at Chinese checkers.
For most of our adult lives, I have lived in the Chattanooga area and my sister, my only sibling, has lived in Nashville. Visiting her, as we often did, was an event, a date to mark on the calender. After my parents died, I had little reason to return to the mid-state except for these visits to my sister's house, which usually occurred around youth soccer tournaments.
Our two sons, ages 14 and 10, grew up making pilgrimages to Aunt Lee-Lee's house in the Belle Meade area of Nashville. There was even an annual summer ritual we called Camp Lee-Lee in which the boys spent a week with their aunt, going rafting and ziplining and swimming in her backyard pool.
Over the years, my younger sister, who is single, always kept an eye on Chattanooga real estate. When we were children, our parents would go on Sunday drives to look at houses. For years, my sister took Sunday excursions on the Zillow website to look houses and condos in Chattanooga.
"Ooh, look at this," she would say, passing me an iPad dialed into photos of some downtown condo. "Cute. I could see myself living there."
If the Chattanooga Chamber of Commerce needs a poster child, my sister would make a good one. Charming and confident, she works for a medical management company and could live in just about any city in the United States with an airport. She chose Chattanooga mostly because it brought her closer to her nephews, but also because of the high quality of life here.
"I love my little airport," she says of the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport with its modest five-gate concourse. When you spend a big part of your life in New York's LaGuardia and Chicago's O'Hare, the airport here feels like a cozy, two-car garage.
Last winter, my sister zeroed in on a early 20th-century mountain cottage here that had been gutted, refurbished and flipped. She lived in an area of Nashville where developers buy and tear down vintage little $400,000 homes to build multi-million-dollar duplexes. If you value preservation, it's not a pretty picture.
She sold her house there to a neighbor and moved into her cottage here last winter. She immediately set about decorating it to her tastes and planning to build a back porch covered with a metal roof - an echo of our childhood. As kids, we used to sit on a front porch under a tin roof and listen to it rain.
Nowadays, our sons can ride the school bus to her house on some days. Our older son dog-sits for her some and mows her lawn. Meanwhile, our younger son is Aunt Lee-Lee's favorite companion for shopping and home-decorating projects.
Honestly, it's been a little different for me having Lee Ann so nearby. Now that I see her every few days instead of every couple of months, I'm not sure whether to greet her with a hug, a head nod or a high five.
The other night, my younger son and I drove over to sit on Lee Ann's brand-new back porch and warm our hands by a fire.
"Mother would have loved this porch," my sister mused.
"She would also have loved knowing that, after 40 years, her two children were again living in the same city," I thought to myself.
RIP, Mom.
Your babies are back together.
Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 757-6645. His Life Stories column appears Thursdays in the Region section and his Test Drive automotive column publishes Saturdays in the Business section.