TUESDAY, JUNE 24
Nobody in their right mind voluntarily travels to Arizona in June, but on Tuesday we had no choice. It was time to go.
We passed a kiosk in the Nashville Airport selling a small variety of regional craft beers, but I was too ready to find our gate and sweating too much in my linen blend pants to care. After we sat down I said, “Do you think that vendor sells beer in go cups?” because we had really good seats and even I couldn’t be arsed to give them up for the possibility of an IPA. Megan said, “No I seriously doubt it,” because this wasn’t Vegas it was the Bible Belt. I thought she was probably right but would it hurt to find out?
Reader, that vendor sure as hell did sell beer in a go cup, and Megan returned triumphant with a SweetWater IPA, the goshdanged best IPA in the motherlovin’ South. Bless EVERYONE’s heart. Amen.
Since I was seven years old, I’d said if I ever left that place, I’d never go back, but I did. Several times in fact. I went back with Slade in 2000 when his dad left for a routine six-month deployment and I discovered the secret of that tree canopy, sewed my first skirt, and found/lost parts of myself on a hippie farm. After a soul-sucking fight in 2001, I programmed our home stereo to play “Goodbye to You” on infinite repeat and drove from Florida to Tennessee with Slade and a cat named Les Paw (was briefly into guitars again) when it was almost Thanksgiving and I thought I was ready for a divorce. I went back in 2002 when Elsie’s cancer relapse meant she had about four months left to live and California would wait because it was time to help her check things off her to-do list. I went back three years later with Slade, Eli and a cat named Oma while we waited to sign on a duplex in Virginia Beach.
But I knew all those times were temporary and I counted the days ’til I could go home to Florida or California or Virginia. I was working hard to make these other places my home and sometimes they were — I mean sometimes I did a really good job.
This is where I say that now I know — that it’s taken me 26 years but now I know that actually I would go back. I’d go back for backyard vegetable gardens and tree showers and weeknight dinners at my sister’s and beans on porches and I’d go back even for my Mama. I’d go back for me. And now I know what home is: it’s there. I admit it! I want to go home and I want that home to be Tennessee! I’m sorry for all the shit I said and for swearing I’d rather live in an RV than go back to that place. I miss you, Tennessee. I miss you and I want to come HOME. We’ve started saving for a downpayment, and fall asleep most nights looking at property within an hour’s drive of my mother’s house. We’re almost there.
And as much as it punches me in the ribs — I mean right in the fucking lungs — I realized last night that it’s here, too. Home is here, too! I’m done fighting you, Arizona. I’m calling a truce. One day I’ll be back in Tennessee for good, but for now, you dried up dusty broiling hell-oven on earth, I’m home in you.
