My family and I have moved many times within my 15-year-old life, but I’ve never lived out of Texas or even out of the city of Austin.

I love change, so the feeling of moving is amazing for me. You’re entering a whole new world in a whole new home and life gets a whole new start, even if you’re moving only minutes away.

Almost everything in our lives change when we move. The people we know, the atmosphere of the house, and the location of the furniture but one thing always stays the same: 620 highway.

No matter where my family migrates to, 620 is always an axis point that gets us from point A to point B on a daily basis; even if we move an hour away, 620 always seems to be there.

It’s like a guardian angel that watches and guides us in our path, but it’s neither an angel of life or an angel of death. It’s somewhere in between. It’s a neutral frequency and is probably the only constant in my family’s life besides God.

When it comes close to the moving date, we begin to pack our lives into various sizes of boxes. My mom slowly wraps everything in the cabinets plate by plate with a flat expression. She judges each object by its value and fragileness to decide how much movers’ wrapping she’s going to put around the perimeter.

This is also how humans judge people in life. Depending on how valuable and fragile a person is to you depends on how cushioned you are going to make the words that you say to them.

My mom never feels like she actually has ever had a place to call home, because there’s a difference between a house and a home. We’ve lived in many different shapes and sizes of homes, but there is only one place that the rest of our family actually calls home, which is the house we live in now in Round Rock. But for my mother, she lacks the sense of hominess in every house we’ve been in.

I believe that someday there will be a move that when she wraps those plates to move, there will be a smile on her face because she knows she’s going home.