I have a hope that is currently being deferred. It involves a six-state move. I am so homesick for the South. Don't get me wrong...my heart's home is really with my husband and son. Wherever they are, I am home. But.....
Every spring it hits, and by early summer the full-blown yearning is well underway. There is a certain smell, feel, sound, and look to my South during these months. My sweet mother has started sending me her Southern Livings, and that is special in itself. But they are treasures to me because as she reads them she has a post-it pad and pen beside her. When she comes to a part she knows we will both like or laugh at or be inspired by or roll our eyes over, she makes a little comment and sticks it to the page. I get this "conversation" in the mail a few days later. I've recently begun responding with my own post-its and sending them back.
I love this newfound tradition, and yet it has inspired tears on more than one occasion. The latest
started because an article about azaleas. The photos were beautiful, and in seeing them I could really and truly smell the hot dustiness of my grandmother's front porch in Tuscaloosa one summer. My grown-up skin could feel the memory of sweat running down my back and the peeling grey paint under my hand. In another memory I am in the "ladybug room" at my grandparents house, also in Tuscaloosa, lying on the bed trying to read Little Women while scratching the 27 mosquito bites that dotted my legs. That room was so cool compared to the blistering cicada heat outside. I had just come in from listening for bobwhites and watching the butterflies who were attracted to the rotting persimmons at the base of the tree.
Each memory becomes one charm on the most loaded bracelet in the world. That's why I had to revise my title to Part One. Next I think I will cover Bellingrath Gardens, the trip to Mobile, driving to Destin with my parents and son only a few summers ago, the infamous Summer of Poison Ivy, barbeque, Atlanta's Phipps Plaza, the Seafood Platter, junkyards, my grandmother's heartbreakingly beautiful bearded irises, and the neighbors' neurotic chihuahua who had the ridiculous name of Peanut. Which brings me to how my uncle always poured a pack of peanuts into his Coca-Cola bottle so as to taste the salty-and-sweet, the time my cousin dropped a wagon tongue onto my toe, and later sitting on the step with her to eat rich vanilla ice cream after my toenail cracked off. The band-aid was impressive. That ice cream was so sweet and creamy and good.
At least that's how I remember it.
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