Pay Attention


On My Home

I’m in Alabama. It’s six o’clock on a morning in late March, and I’m sitting on the back patio of my wife’s parents’ house. I’m wearing pajamas, but I’m not wearing shoes. The Gulf Coast is lovely in the Spring. Allow me to forget for the moment that it’s a bitch in Summer.

I grew up in Alabama, suffering most of my education and waiting out the better part of my twenties within its borders. I was born in North Texas, and I live in the hill country of Texas now. In the interim, I spent five years on the San Francisco Bay. My Texas and California homes have much to recommend them. Northern California borders, almost insufferably, on edenic. But neither of them feel quite right to me in the Spring.

It’s the smell of Spring that I miss most now. Central Texas can be warm and humid in just the right way, but it smells wrong. The air around Mobile Bay smells of saltwater and fish. Like people who can never quite convince themselves that fall has come without the smell of burning leaves, I can never be comfortable that winter is gone without a hint of brine in the air.

The trees and soil bear specific smells too. Pine is obvious, but the air under the Live Oaks smells of sweet humus. I suspect that red clay and sand can be identified with a whiff, though I haven’t put it to a test.

I didn’t feel the gravity of this place before I left it, although looking back it’s obvious how hard it was to escape it. Life can be easy here if you have a little money or if you’re young and don’t need it. There are endless ways to pass the time. I think about living here sometimes. I imagine buying one of those beautiful old homes downtown Mobile and settling in to become one of those eccentrics who refuses to go West of the Civil War cannon that unofficially marks the hazy border between the fantasy world of the Old South and the reality of modern suburbs.

I won’t do it, though. That’s the dream of the part of me that wants to turn inward and hide. That’s the me that wants to give up on dreams and futures and enjoy an everlasting present. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not for me.

It wouldn’t make me happy or unhappy. I’m happy now. It would make me comfortable, and that’s not for me. Not yet. For now, I need to be a little uncomfortable. I need to want some things so that I can keep becoming me.

That’s story I tell myself, and it’s true as far as it goes, but there’s something else that’s been in the back of my mind for a few years now.

I need to live in a place where the future seems real and present, a place where dreams can be built. I need to live in a place like that because that’s the kind of place where I want my children to grow up and live and call home.

And I don’t want them to leave me.

  1. stephenharred posted this