“A thing is mighty big when time and distance cannot shrink it.” — Zora Neale Hurston

And so i start thinking about packing our bags because we are, after almost exactly two impossibly long years, going home. The presents will go in, and toys for the plane. i will take too many books and a camera with real film. This week i’ll try to eat more so you’ll all have one less thing to worry about. We will spend much of our time driving, which is how i like to see my state. Flat, subtle, winter Florida. Crisp with tiny frosts more suitable to early October than deep, high December. After a couple of days its wet cold will creep into my fingers and toes and no number of hot showers will set me right. i’m sure no one will indulge me, but for months i’ve been wanting to visit this bend in the road we used to pass when we were heading south over through Crescent City to the coast. Dad, you would point to it and tell me again that you and Mom thought about buying it before you settled on the house in Palatka. i imagine a shadowy wooden farmhouse on the plot, wrapped into tall pines and blackberry bramble and palmetto groves. A place for a flower farm, if i ever make it back home. Those ‘this-almost-happened-instead’ stories were always my favorite. Like how you would tell me about your high school sweetheart and how i would have had bigger boobs if you’d married her and maybe red hair. I wish you still had the old blue Chevy truck instead of your fancy Cadillac SUV, but i guess they’re related. i also want to go see the town Zora Neale Hurston grew up in, but that’s linked to a different desire and a longer anecdote. What i will insist on is a trip to the ravine. The state park we drove to almost daily to go jogging or swimming or just to get lost in its New Deal bridges and fountains. The first poem i ever committed to memory written on a bronze plate in a birdbath. The columns lining the entrance. One for each American state, each with a tiny plaque listing the state flower and bird and song and i would try to remember them all, but now i can only manage orange blossoms for us.Even this morning, when i woke, i was scheming a plan to make it possible for Jonas and me to take over the house in Palatka. We could rebuild all the gardens and finish the barn and fix the chicken coop and the treehouses and the wooden swing seats roped to fat oak branches. There would be grassy gutters full of tadpoles when it rains and a gardenia bush heads taller than me in the front yard. Clarence and Maureen across the street would teach Jonas how to ride horses and play piano, and i could rely on the neighborhood boys to push him into football and out of trees and pass along the rituals of small animal torture. And then i know i’m awake because suddenly Williamsburg and Palatka are not a few stops apart on the BQE. There’s no way i could get him to school on time from there, and that’s all that really matters. Walking home this afternoon, he was mesmerized by the gasoline glossing the shallow creeks pouring over the snow alongside the curb. “Look Mama, rainbows!” And i wondered what happens to children who don’t grow up with the forgiving padding of green that i was allowed. Will the trash someday be a part of his own deafening nostalgia?
That’s my South and my own historical drawl. An accent that never stuck because of the bleached-out Miami parental tongue. South meaning something much closer than the distances you will travel. When you called, i was walking home but i kept wandering as i listened–coughing, long johns under my jeans. You told me to go inside, but i was terrified that i might get narcoleptic if i sat down, and you know i would have stayed out there all night until you could sleep. Passing out was an absurd concern, because when i finally came in i wrote down every word of it i could remember and still couldn’t sleep for hours. Wide awake in the sound of you–coppery but with vowels more like a native New Yorker than the kind of southern twang i know. i will admit to sometimes losing words because i’m trying to tuck into the ticklish, broad dipthongs, but i was paying close attention when you said that the Latin root of ‘relationship’ built some kind of foundational phenomenological necessity of physical proximity into its definition. What you said was much prettier. Of course i looked it up, and maybe it doesn’t really matter, but that’s not exactly how it was described. What i found was “carrying back” (-lat). “Again” (-re). Which is really quite different. And later, when you wrote, ‘i can’t imagine where these stories come from,’ and i gave you an out, i liked how you didn’t take it.