Sherry and Tom Morgan know that your choices in life determine a lot to things - you get to help create your own happiness in life, there's luck and fortune, and there's hard work and having a vision. Living in rural Northern Virginia for a couple of decades, they've done alright, she doing social work for the county and Tom working on cars at a small shop outside of Winchester, Virginia.
Not being so far from the nation's capital, there's a good mix of people around in the community, but it's hard to get ahead, competing for the better houses and just the cost of food and having fun, you have a lot of established farmers and business owners and retired federal government workers on pensions driving up the cost of life.
They both enjoy work and socializing with ordinary people. Their only child grew up enjoying a comfortable life around Winchester, good schools, lots of friends, sports and nice vacations with mom and dad down to the Chesapeake shore in the summers, with trips to New York City and camping on the Blue Ridge and even a few trips down to the Bahamas over winter break during her teenage years. Tom never attended college and Sherry had graduated from the University of Washington in Seattle. When it came time for their daugther to choose a college, she chose the University of Washington. Empty nesters.
Sherry is burned out on her social work job, managing a team of young child services workers for the county, but she knows she's making a difference, and is really good at her job. One night she's missing her daughter, ten hours away including the airport drive time, and just for fun she starts looking at job postings in Portland, close to Seattle, but not closing in on her daughter's new territory. More out of the sense of doing something and reaffirming her own sense of self-worth, she posts a resume late at night.
It turns out her experience and training look attractive to someone in Washington County, Oregon, and two weeks later she has returned from a job interview there, and a few days later Sherry and Tom are ready to head out to Oregon, filled with renewed purpose and hunger for life, motivated by the knowledge that they will live and work within a three hour drive of their daughter in Seattle.
The thing that Tom will miss most about leaving Virginia is his three golfing buddies. For years, the foursome has played at municipal clubs up and down the Shenandoah Valley, and leaving the comraderie of his friends makes him sad and apprehensive about the prospect of again finding the kind of mostly unspoken but deeply shared friendship that comes from spending hours together doing something that can never be perfected and has no economic goal - completely unlike his work of fixing cars, working for someone else for wages, always trying to please other people, some who trust you and some who may never completely appreciate or trust you and your work.
