We moved to Texas the last week of December 2015. And since we\u2019ve been here the question that I\u2019ve been asked the most is \u201cHow do you like Texas?\u201d Well\u2026 there\u2019s the polite, \u201cTexas is fine,\u201d or even better, \u201cTexas is great!\u201d But I\u2019m a writer and words, well\u2026 I like to use them in creative ways. How do you describe your impressions of a new place in only a sentence or two?
\nIt\u2019s a lot warmer. There\u2019s half a foot of snow on the ground in Utah while it\u2019s raining here in Texas. It\u2019s been the hottest winter of my life, with most days in the sixties or seventies. I\u2019ve done the week in Southern California around Christmas time before. That was novel, wearing short sleeves and no jacket even at night during the winter. I\u2019ve only been asked about five times \u201cAren\u2019t you cold?\u201d I can remember only one day in the last two Texas months that I wore my jacket outside early in the morning. My morning routine in Utah was jacket, heavy overcoat, shoes, zip up the coat, pull the hood up and shiver to take the kids to school. Here I grab my keys and purse and if I\u2019m feeling really lazy I use flip-flops instead of shoes. One wet Texas morning I had to wipe the dew off my side windows so I could see. Compared to the scraping ice off my windows that I was doing in December in Utah, Texas is heavenly.
\nH.E.B\u2019s are everywhere here. I had never heard of the store before. No Harmon\u2019s or Ream\u2019s are here. Of course there are wine aisles in the grocery store. They don\u2019t have those in Utah. I remembered them from when I lived in California as a pre-teen.
\nThe real question they are asking \u201cIs how do you like the people?\u201d The people of Texas are great, they are from California, Iowa, Michigan, Utah, Georgia and some are even from Texas. I\u2019ve been called \u201cMa\u2019am\u201d more times in the last two months than I have in the last twenty years.
\nI do live in an interesting city, near Austin, where the recent population growth means that I meet more transplants than Texans on any given day. Which brings me to my biggest question: How long do I need to reside here before I can claim that I\u2019m Texan?
\nSo when you come on by I\u2019ll say, \u201cHowdy you\u2019ll. Welcome!\u201d and then I\u2019ll have to ask, \u201cHow do you like Texas?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
We moved to Texas the last week of December 2015. And since we\u2019ve been here the question that I\u2019ve been asked the most is \u201cHow do you like Texas?\u201d Well\u2026 there\u2019s the polite, \u201cTexas is fine,\u201d or even better, \u201cTexas is great!\u201d But I\u2019m a writer and words, well\u2026 I like to use them in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[33,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bsb","category-family"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p45dqf-37","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":249,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/249"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarahwagstaff.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}