Most know I am a native son from Oregon. I truly love Oregon. We currently live in Nuevo Leon, Mexico, but will move back to Texas, God willing, when our house there is built–probably toward the end of 2025. It is becoming increasingly evident that I will never again live in Oregon although I will always call it my home. The kids are on the east coast and Lorena’s family is in Mexico and Texas. While it remains, in my estimation, the most beautiful state in the nation, the politics of the state have made it almost unlivable. The schools are some of the worst in the nation, there are huge crime and drug problems, and Christian morality is actively mocked in law and culture. Still, I would love to be there. Our first relative arrived there in 1846 along the Applegate Trail. The latest any of the others arrived was in the last couple of decades of the 19th century.
We are grateful to Texas and Nuevo Leon with their beautiful cultures and acceptance of outsiders, but I will always be an outsider in those places even though their moral senses are more aligned with my own.