PERSONAL NARRATIVE: Back to the Future. On My Relocation to My Home State

Just over four years ago my wife and I moved from Louisiana to the DMV. In 2025 we are returning to the state at a time that can be both prosperous, and perilous.

Our initial move from Baton Rouge to Prince George’s Country, Maryland, circa September 2020

In late September 2020, my wife and I started on a journey to a new state, one that neither of us had ever lived in. In the fall of the first year of the pandemic, we packed up all our belongings from our modest rental house in Mid-City Baton Rouge to relocate to the mid-Atlantic region (DMV) and begin a new (albeit isolated) life in Hyattsville, Maryland. At the time of our relocation, I was just over a month past my 40th birthday and had never known residence outside of Baton Rouge. My wife, Leslie, a New Jersey native, had spent most of her life in South Louisiana after initially leaving her home state for college in New Orleans (Xavier University of Louisiana) before relocating to Baton Rouge in 2005 in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

When we left Baton Rouge in the Fall of 2020 we didn’t have a definitive life plan outside of a desire for a change in environment. The mandated social distancing brought on by the pandemic allowed me an easier exit from my hometown than a fully opened world would have, and Leslie had long been interested in relocating closer to her home region, so the timing of a quarantined world presented a good opportunity to start anew.

Before relocating to the DMV, I spent the previous two years occasionally visiting Washington, DC as a part of a Kennedy Center Fellowship cohort. Those trips to the Nation’s Capital planted the seeds of relocation possibilities for us, so when our conversations in the first quarter of 2020 began pivoting toward leaving the Deep South, relocating to the DMV was a no-brainer.

We got off to a rough start in our lives in PG County as Leslie’s dad passed away within five days of us moving into our new apartment. Two weeks after settling into our mostly still box-filled living quarters, we were taking the long drive back to South Louisiana to bury him. At the time I was working as the Chief Content Editor for The North Star News Group, and Leslie was working seven days a week as a contractor for Blavity News. Our apartment was a quaint, arts-deco space that often felt very confining as neighbors were masked strangers, and the new beginnings we were seeking were stymied by a world closed for business.