This Place

When we first came here to visit, I thought, This place is not beautiful. There were awkward juxtapositions of forests and fields next to new construction neighborhoods lined with cookie cutter homes. There were cows in one field, and a few horses in another field, and every place looked the same: boring.

It was not love at first sight, or even second sight. It was an unavoidable fact, that we would pack up the first house we ever bought and move here, to this place. We came weeping. I did not want to come.

It has been five years now, and on the way to church we drive past the tobacco fields and I see that it is a sea of dark green, and I think of last winter when it was a field of dirt, and I know that in a few months as the fields ripen we will see the bug-like sprayers rolling across the fields, and then the heavy machinery will arrive and the tobacco will be picked and the cycle will begin again. I like that we have lived in this place long enough to know that the rhythms of these fields.

Whenever we are driving down one stretch of Highway 30—which is what all the roads are, highways without street names, and I have to try to remember which number is which, and I still sometimes get it wrong—I hear my children yell, Pink car! and House with all the windows! and I like that in this place we drive down the same roads so often that my children remember what belongs there.

A few years ago I needed cough medicine for a sick kid, and the only place closer than 20 minutes away is a Dollar General that is not always well stocked, but when I walked in I saw that they had recently installed an aisle where they were now stocking fresh produce. I had never been inside a Dollar General until we moved here, and I like that in this place I can buy bananas without going all the way to town, even if sometimes I can’t walk down the aisles of the store because they don’t have enough employees to unload the shipments in a reasonable amount of time, and boxes are blocking what I need, and I have to wait until I go into town to get more shampoo.

To go to town is a whole endeavor, at least a morning or an afternoon, and I stack my errands together to save gas and time. Drop off the library books, pick up a rotisserie chicken at Costco, take the Amazon return to the UPS store, grab the weekly BOGOs at Publix, pick up the cross stitch floss I need from Hobby Lobby, drop off donations at Goodwill. We live in a medium house that is not on the prairie, but I sometimes chuckle to myself as I pretend I am going to town like Pa used to do with Laura and stocking up on necessities.

The cow pasture near our house marks time with the arrival of the calves, black as their mothers. They are curious but cautious, and if you try to get too close to the fence they will prance away to a safe distance. Every year they are born, and we watch them grow in the field, and then they are gone. Perhaps some of them are slaughtered, or the females join the ranks of the breeding mothers. We cannot tell one from another because they are just black cows, but it feels like the same black cows are there all year, and on the way to school on cold winter mornings, as we wait in the line to cross over Highway 17 into the driveway of the elementary school, we marvel at how the cows don’t seem to feel the frigid temperatures.

There is a donkey who lives next to the cow pasture, and his name is Eeyore, though for a while we thought his name was Igor, which is also a good name for a donkey. I do not know the lifespan of a donkey, but when Eeyore is no longer behind the fence, I know that there will be grief and the kids will mention it when we drive by. One time when our youngest was a toddler he tried to feed Eeyore a carrot, and Eeyore accidentally bit his finger, and I had to call the pediatrician in town and ask what to do about a donkey bite, and she said, We’ve never dealt with that before. I like that we live in this place where we know the name of the donkey, and sometimes we feed him carrots or apples, or his favorite food, banana peels, while we pay careful attention to our fingers.

Eeyore

The other day I was driving down the road that goes by Eeyore’s fence and there was a large turtle moving slowly down the middle of the two-lane road. I like that we live in this place where I can stop my car, put it in park, get out, and move the turtle to the wooded grass next to the road. He wiggled his legs when I picked him up, but when I placed him safely in the grass and moved back to my van, I saw him poke his head out of his shell and take in his surroundings, and he didn’t go back to the road.

On the road that takes us to town, where we can go to the library and mail packages and buy groceries, there is a house set back from the road with a fenced in area in front. For a long time there were two ostriches, but now there is only one ostrich, but there is also a miniature pony. I wonder what happened to the other ostrich. Were the ostriches partners or nest-mates or just companions? I am sad for the one ostrich, and I am glad that he has a pony friend now, and I like that we live in this place where people have ostriches for pets and I can notice when an ostrich has gone missing because I drive down that road so often.

There are almost no traffic lights here, and instead there are roundabouts and four-way stops. You drive for a long time without stopping until you get to one of these things. I have learned that most people don’t know the rules of roundabouts and four-way stops. You have to pay attention, and you have to see if other people see you, and you can’t pretend you live alone in this place, because otherwise a car might run into you.

A few months after we moved here, the kids and I were driving to town and on a road near our house, I got pulled over by a sheriff’s deputy. The lights in my rearview mirror almost sent me into a panic, and my irrational fear of policemen combined with postpartum hormones meant I was in tears before he even got to my window. He asked me if I knew the speed limit and I said I wasn’t totally sure because we had just moved here but I thought it was 55 miles per hour (because in my limited experience that was the speed limit on every single road anywhere near our house). He peeked in my windows and saw my kids, including the sleeping newborn. Then he said it was 35 miles per hour on that road, and he gave me a ticket with what to me felt like an insurmountable fine attached to it. But as I was making dinner that night, my phone rang. It was the deputy. He said upon further reflection he realized I was new to the area and he appreciated that all my kids had been wearing seat belts and he was going to downgrade the ticket to a warning. I like that in this place that is not so big I always see that very same deputy directing traffic in front of the high school, and my heart is warmed when I think about his compassion on a new mom.

Until we moved here I had never seen so many homes that put up decorations at Halloween. I was familiar with Christmas inflatables, but here, maybe because there is not a lot else going on, you will begin to see signs of Halloween in September, as people put out spiders and dragons and Disney characters dressed up like ghosts. When the weather gets cooler the kids and I will take a nightly walk around our neighborhood to see what new decorations have popped up. In a neighborhood close to ours, there is a house with five or six motion-activated terrifying figures who are at least as tall as a human and who talk or reach out to you when you walk past. I will buckle the kids into Christian’s truck, and when we are safely within the neighborhood, I will let them unbuckle and climb into the bed of the truck so we can creep around the neighborhood and try to get the decorations to talk to us. I like that in this place we have made a tradition of driving around looking for werewolves and witches as the evenings start to get colder.

We went to an event at the high school a few weeks ago, and our oldest is only a freshman, but the graduating seniors were recognized, and I mentally traveled ahead three years to when our son is a senior, and I hope that this will be his school, and I wonder how many more memories and roots and relationships will we have then than we have now. I like that we are putting down roots in this place, and we are known and our children are known, and we are not alone.

At night you can see the stars. I will walk the circle of our neighborhood and it is mostly concrete and pavement and more cookie cutter houses, so it does not inspire a lot of awe, but if you look up and not around, it feels like you are alone in the world, just you and the stars, and I don’t remember being able to see them so clearly when we lived a mile from Trader Joe’s. I think about how I am one person in this one neighborhood in this one county and God looks down and sees me in this place.

This is the story of the falling in love of a person with a place over months and years, and you don’t even know that it is home until you leave for the place that used to be home, and then you begin driving back to this place and you get to the point where you know how to get home without Apple Maps, because you know that you are supposed to turn left after you pass that one house, and then you just have to make it to the roundabout where the Dollar General is and take the first exit, and then you will drive past the new Parker’s gas station, and the pebble ice at Parker’s is so good, and you will keep driving down past the abandoned elementary school where it looks like you could probably survive the zombie apocalypse, and then you will turn left at the white Lutheran church where your son’s Scouts troop meets, and one time they had a bonfire and your kids still talk about the nighttime hay ride, and you will see the fields with the black cows, and you will turn right just past that.

And then I will turn left onto our street and see the climbing roses that Christian has nurtured from young plants and that now cover an entire trellis against our house. And I will be so glad to be home.