John Shearer: Saying Hello And Goodbye To Home

  • Monday, May 29, 2017
  • John Shearer
Our recent home in Knoxville
Our recent home in Knoxville
photo by John Shearer
Late last year my wife, Laura, decided she was ready to retire this summer from her work as a United Methodist pastor and pastoral counselor, a vocation she had felt called to pursue at middle age.
 
Retirement was certainly fine, I told her. But it was the next part that hit me harder – she wanted to move from Knoxville, where we had lived for the last 12 years, back to our former hometown of Chattanooga.
 
Although I had grown up in Chattanooga and spent the large majority of my first 45 years here and had always loved the community, I had also become enamored with Knoxville.
 
Since arriving there in 2005, I have enjoyed immersing myself in the culture of this city that is also reviving its downtown in a slightly different way from Chattanooga.
 I have considered myself lucky to get to write stories for the Knoxville News Sentinel as a freelancer, and teach journalism and English at UT and even tutor some well-known Vol athletes.
 
My connection to UT made me feel as though I was at ground zero of a place very important to thousands of Chattanoogans and others across the state.
 
The negative feelings I felt toward Knoxville and the University of Tennessee as a proud Chattanoogan and University of Georgia alumnus in the 1980s and ‘90s had long since moved to the distant past.
 
I now love UT – except when the Vols play Georgia in football and some of the other major sports.
 
I also thoroughly enjoyed being a Knoxvillian, whether it was jogging at Lakeshore and Sequoyah Hills parks, getting to worship at the unique Church Street United Methodist Church or just watching WBIR Channel 10 news every night.
 
As a result, I must admit that I cried more than once when I realized Laura was serious about moving back to Chattanooga to be closer to two of her sons and to the community she still preferred over Knoxville.
 
So, somewhat reluctantly, I agreed back in January to go on this next journey. But once we started looking at houses in Chattanooga, I started getting more excited. Besides, I would also be closer to my father, Dr. Wayne Shearer; my sister, Cathy Morris: and my niece, Mandi Hampton, and her family.
 
Occasionally during my regular visits down here to visit my father, I would run into an old friend or acquaintance who was surprised I had been living in Knoxville since 2005, because the person had seen periodic stories by me in chattanoogan.com.  
 
I guess that is the life of a freelancer who still enjoys writing about and keeping up with his old former hometown of Chattanooga!
 
As a way of softening greatly my Knoxville withdrawal symptoms, I have been given an opportunity to continue teaching some journalism classes at UT a couple of days a week this fall. I am also going to continue writing some for Knoxville publications and trying to work in feature story interviews while up there.
 
It is only a roughly 90-minute trip up Interstate 75 through scenic East Tennessee, and that regular trip does not seem to tire me. And I am sure several people regularly travel back and forth between the two cities for their work – although they are likely sales representatives or regional managers with nicer paychecks than I.
 
As a result of these opportunities, if all goes according to plan, I will now hopefully be running into Knoxville acquaintances surprised I am living in Chattanooga!
 
We have been living back in Chattanooga for about a week, but it took us awhile to find a home. With the help of our Realtor, a very patient Fiona Eischeid, and one of her associates, we came down about once a week for about a month and usually looked at four or five houses during each visit.
 
We looked at houses on Big Ridge and in East Ridge, Hixson, Signal Mountain, Red Bank, the Belvoir area, St. Elmo and Stuart Heights. Talk about eclectic tastes!
 
We quickly learned it is a seller’s market, and if you see a nice home that is in good condition and is reasonably priced and is in a trendy part of town, it might already be off the market by the time you call your agent. I also learned that a pre-World War II bungalow or craftsman style of home in Red Bank is very much in demand – because it costs about half as much as the same home in North Chattanooga.
 
We are fortunate that our mid-century ranch style home in the West Hills area of Knoxville we are selling is in a neighborhood much in demand, too. But that does not mean that I will not miss it and its thin brick and pink- and light blue-tiled bathrooms any less.
 
Somewhat surprisingly, we ended up finding in Chattanooga a mid-1960s tri-level home in good condition in an area where we weren’t really looking hard – Hixson near Northgate Mall.
 
The home has hardwood floors and a few mid-century features now considered appealing, including thin brick and light blue bathroom tile – just like in our Knoxville home, a residence that had first been lived in by major league baseball player Ed Bailey.
 
And to boot, our new home even has a small wooded area of mature hardwood trees – although the steep backyard makes me want to hire a billy goat to cut the grass.
 
We have already met one or two neighbors – including a snake that my wife saw in the backyard shortly before we moved in. We have also seen a big hawk hanging around.
 
Overall, we are enjoying being back in town so far. Our Westie, Maisie, and I have already visited the Greenway Farm in Hixson a couple of times. I have also run into a couple of acquaintances from my past at restaurants I have eaten at while we are waiting to unpack or clean up our kitchen enough to cook regularly.
 
That is one fact I found about being in Knoxville for 12 years – you don’t get to know nearly as many people as you did in the city where you grew up and lived for more than four decades.
 
Another Chattanooga acquaintance I have enjoyed reconnecting with is the city’s scenery, including, as mentioned, at the Greenway Farm.
 
On Sunday, Laura and I decided to get an ice cream cone at Clumpie’s off Frazier Avenue and then walked across part of the Walnut Street Bridge.
 
There before us in a panoramic spread were well-manicured Coolidge Park, the tranquil Tennessee River, downtown Chattanooga with all its new residential buildings, and awe-inspiring Lookout and Raccoon mountains.
 
The quickly melting chocolate chunk ice cream that dripped on my shirt did little to damage the ambience and enjoyment of the moment.  
 
I look forward to continuing to reconnect with Chattanooga in other similar ways, while also taking regular trips to visit another cherished friend – the city of Knoxville.
 
Jcshearer2@comcast.net
Our current home in Hixson
Our current home in Hixson
photo by John Shearer
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