Home
(Scholastic Regional Gold Key 2014)
As I cross the county line, I think I can almost smell the pork rinds and cow manure. I’ve only been gone for the weekend, but the fresher city air had totally eradicated my sense of home--until now. I try to steady the wheel even though I want to make a sharp turn across the median and floor the car back in the opposite direction. Out of the corner of my eye, I see a subtle smile creep up the side of my dad’s face. After a long and arduous three days in the foreign land of the north, he’s home and he couldn’t be happier. I know he’s thinking about his weekly outing for barbecue with his friends and that he longs to flow back into the hospitable slow-paced life of the South. I see a twinkle in his eye when we pass the “Welcome to Shelby” sign, but all I can think is that it’s written on a dilapidated scrap of chain-link fence. That’s the jolly and welcoming emerald gate to our town: a piece of chain-link fence--not even one that was already in place; the section was cut specifically to welcome all the rednecks and cow-tippers and lost travelers that enter our city limits.
Now I’ve lived here for all seventy-one years and I can’t find anything to complain about. Sure, the accents are deep and the pastures more sprawling than the neighborhoods, but that’s what makes it so beautiful. There’s no place in the world as kind and as caring as our little hamlet. And besides, you can at least agree that you won’t get livermush or hush puppies up in Yankeeland, don’t you reckon?
I’ve never understood why “I reckon” or “over yonder” or “daggum” are part of the vocabulary of a doctorate-holding man, but that’s how it seems to be around here. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or where you’ve been, what matters is what you’ve done here and that you never abandoned the tiny little courtsquare or the congregation of the quaint little red-brick church. If you’re born here, you’re pretty much stuck here. But not me. We’re almost home and I can feel this life re-embracing me with a hug coated in quicksand and mounted on the back of a snail. I’m noticing the drivers taking their sweet time for a casual Sunday afternoon cruise, smiling at the highway and the barns and the trailers. I quickly whip the car into the passing lane and soar around them, no turn signal, but they don’t seem to care. How I wish I could breathe such content air--how I wish I could steal a bit of my father’s serenity, could live out the tradition of the family and raise my kids here only for them to raise theirs and see me take my last breath--here. But that’s not me; I wasn’t built for tradition, rather for subversion. Not for adaptation, but for relocation.
You see that bush over there? That’s where old Dan Bell pushed me down in the third grade. The thorns cut deep into my skin, and mother had to call the doctor in to have a look--that’s what they did then, you know. The doctors came to you. You didn’t go to them. It was a better day, a more...personal day. Now I walk in for a check-up and every time the face is different and doesn’t know mine. This town is getting too big. Before long we’ll sink in a sea of skyscrapers and commotion; I’m glad I lived to see better times than these.
But those times couldn’t have been better. They sound even worse; a town that’s so infinitesimally small can’t possibly be getting too big. Maybe I’m just “stuck up,” as I’ve been told on occasion, but I just don’t get it. Either way, I know I have to grit my teeth and allow my dad’s fascinations with everything that encircles our daily lives here in this anti-metropolis.
You know that house over there is where my mother lived when Hurricane Hugo hit, right? Yes; I’ve only heard the story twenty times. That the tree fell almost down the center of the master bedroom? Sounds familiar. And that the vacant lot on the corner over there used to be the home to my school? That too. Being away surely does put things into perspective, doesn’t it? All that hustle and bustle and honking and screeching left me dried out as a prune, but now I can finally breathe again.
As I make the final turn--the one into our driveway--dusk has long since approached and I can see only the faint glow of the sun on the horizon behind the house. When I step back into the car after getting the mail, I notice that the corner of my headlight has been shining on the side of the hydrangea bush in the yard, illuminating the four different colors on each ripe bud. My dad is staring at the bush, which was given by the neighbors up and down the street in memory of my mother.
Really is beautiful, isn’t it?
He’s looking at the bush, but I know that’s not what he’s really talking about. And then I see the yards and the walls of the houses on past ours--the tree and the tire swing down the street where I used to play, the creek where I used to make my mother take me--not for anything particular, but just to be with her and feel the cool, rushing water on my feet. All of a sudden I want to leave the car and the city behind me and sprint to the tree, jump in my tire, hear the water below me, and know that everything is alright. I feel the dusk fading to darkness, but the whole street seems to smile at me, and I know the land beyond it is not merely a pasture. I’m not trapped here.
Some of us may have different views of our little town nestled between a caved-in gas station and the rest of the world, but at the end of the day, not even I can deny its quirky sense of home. Part of me does still want to back the car straight out of the driveway and go far past the single rusty stoplight at the edge of town, out and beyond to something else, anything else, but my hand pulls the gear shift into drive, not reverse, anyway. I know it’s not an accident, but simply what needs to be. My father and I say nothing as I stop the car in the garage and begin to open the door. We don’t need to. We’re home, and--at least for now--that’s all that matters.
Now I’ve lived here for all seventy-one years and I can’t find anything to complain about. Sure, the accents are deep and the pastures more sprawling than the neighborhoods, but that’s what makes it so beautiful. There’s no place in the world as kind and as caring as our little hamlet. And besides, you can at least agree that you won’t get livermush or hush puppies up in Yankeeland, don’t you reckon?
I’ve never understood why “I reckon” or “over yonder” or “daggum” are part of the vocabulary of a doctorate-holding man, but that’s how it seems to be around here. It doesn’t matter how smart you are or where you’ve been, what matters is what you’ve done here and that you never abandoned the tiny little courtsquare or the congregation of the quaint little red-brick church. If you’re born here, you’re pretty much stuck here. But not me. We’re almost home and I can feel this life re-embracing me with a hug coated in quicksand and mounted on the back of a snail. I’m noticing the drivers taking their sweet time for a casual Sunday afternoon cruise, smiling at the highway and the barns and the trailers. I quickly whip the car into the passing lane and soar around them, no turn signal, but they don’t seem to care. How I wish I could breathe such content air--how I wish I could steal a bit of my father’s serenity, could live out the tradition of the family and raise my kids here only for them to raise theirs and see me take my last breath--here. But that’s not me; I wasn’t built for tradition, rather for subversion. Not for adaptation, but for relocation.
You see that bush over there? That’s where old Dan Bell pushed me down in the third grade. The thorns cut deep into my skin, and mother had to call the doctor in to have a look--that’s what they did then, you know. The doctors came to you. You didn’t go to them. It was a better day, a more...personal day. Now I walk in for a check-up and every time the face is different and doesn’t know mine. This town is getting too big. Before long we’ll sink in a sea of skyscrapers and commotion; I’m glad I lived to see better times than these.
But those times couldn’t have been better. They sound even worse; a town that’s so infinitesimally small can’t possibly be getting too big. Maybe I’m just “stuck up,” as I’ve been told on occasion, but I just don’t get it. Either way, I know I have to grit my teeth and allow my dad’s fascinations with everything that encircles our daily lives here in this anti-metropolis.
You know that house over there is where my mother lived when Hurricane Hugo hit, right? Yes; I’ve only heard the story twenty times. That the tree fell almost down the center of the master bedroom? Sounds familiar. And that the vacant lot on the corner over there used to be the home to my school? That too. Being away surely does put things into perspective, doesn’t it? All that hustle and bustle and honking and screeching left me dried out as a prune, but now I can finally breathe again.
As I make the final turn--the one into our driveway--dusk has long since approached and I can see only the faint glow of the sun on the horizon behind the house. When I step back into the car after getting the mail, I notice that the corner of my headlight has been shining on the side of the hydrangea bush in the yard, illuminating the four different colors on each ripe bud. My dad is staring at the bush, which was given by the neighbors up and down the street in memory of my mother.
Really is beautiful, isn’t it?
He’s looking at the bush, but I know that’s not what he’s really talking about. And then I see the yards and the walls of the houses on past ours--the tree and the tire swing down the street where I used to play, the creek where I used to make my mother take me--not for anything particular, but just to be with her and feel the cool, rushing water on my feet. All of a sudden I want to leave the car and the city behind me and sprint to the tree, jump in my tire, hear the water below me, and know that everything is alright. I feel the dusk fading to darkness, but the whole street seems to smile at me, and I know the land beyond it is not merely a pasture. I’m not trapped here.
Some of us may have different views of our little town nestled between a caved-in gas station and the rest of the world, but at the end of the day, not even I can deny its quirky sense of home. Part of me does still want to back the car straight out of the driveway and go far past the single rusty stoplight at the edge of town, out and beyond to something else, anything else, but my hand pulls the gear shift into drive, not reverse, anyway. I know it’s not an accident, but simply what needs to be. My father and I say nothing as I stop the car in the garage and begin to open the door. We don’t need to. We’re home, and--at least for now--that’s all that matters.