I remember driving into Inez for the first time. My best friend was in the passenger seat, and we were lightly joking around, I believe to keep the emotions and anxiety at bay. As we kept driving – now in Beauty, Kentucky – she kept reminding me how not beautiful Beauty actually is. She listed off the places I was never allowed to go to alone, due to the dilapidated outer shells of the buildings. I am restricted from the pawnshop, the car dealership, the corner store, the post office, etc.
Arriving at my house that same day felt like I dying a little, if I’m being honest. My entire town house smelled like smoke, and the echoes off the walls reminded me just what “moving” means: adjusting and adapting to this emptiness. We weren’t sure my bed was going to fit in my room, as I had decided to go with a Queen Sized bed. I was “so over” the normal twin sized/full sized beds that represented college living. (I’ve been told I’m high maintenance?)
I looked out the window to the Zip Zone gas station in front of my apartment complex with a sigh, and was convinced, somewhere in the inner recesses of my thick skull, that this would never be “home.”
I haven’t been able to write lately. Why, you may ask?? I was finishing my first semester of teaching. Even typing that sentence, uttering the words, sends my head reeling. In oh-so-typical Halie fashion, I find myself lounging on my couch, cat snuggled nearby, reflecting and remembering the past six months. There’s this thing I like to do where I remember every bad, good, better, and worse event and spiral into a pile of nostalgia.
Most of these nostalgic moments happen when I’m driving. It’s as if my mind recalls events from a window, passing a blur of colors and lights and faces.
I remember the first time I drove to soccer practice in July. I was totally unsure of the situation. Who was the coach? What would the girls be like? Would some of them be my students? Were they any good? Was I displaying some sick desire to inflict torture upon myself by volunteering to coach the same time I began a CAREER?
I got to the practice and was greeted warmly, already feeling like I was going to like the coach and his wife. Don’t ask me their names at this point. Hers sounds Italian, and I can get away with “coach” for him. The girls are great too. Kinda skeptical.
I remember the first time my friend from Inez drove us around the entire county. We went up and through and around and beside. Basically, we saw hollers, which I was unfamiliar with. (Insert stereotypical Appalachia joke here. Yes, I’m from West Virginia. No I don’t know what a holler is. I grew up in a neighborhood). He showed us the poorest area of the county, and told us about how a fire had killed a kid up that holler a few years earlier. He said something like, “Yeah, my mom had the little boy (or was it a girl?) in class. It was really awful.” That type of poverty isn’t accessible by one story. It isn’t even accessible or understandable with 5 tales of such despair. Though in hindsight, that conversation certainly set the stage for other experiences I’ve had this fall.
Now I’m driving to my first Cardinal football game. Driving to church on windy country roads. Driving to choir rehearsal. Driving to Prestonsburg to get groceries again, and again, and again. Driving to school before the sun comes up. Driving home, still no glimpse of the sun. Driving home from a funeral. And another one after that. Driving home after driving up a very, very poor holler and realizing that this is where my student lives. Driving past the half McDonald’s, half gas station. Driving past the — what’s that awful smell…oh it’s the sewage issue down at the football field. Driving to Nasheville, Asheville, and more. Driving two friends home for Thanksgiving with the Putorek family. Driving to Huntington to visit friends from college, and having to swallow a lump in my throat the size of Texas, which is coincidentally the state a new friend calls home. Speaking of friends, I sure miss fill in the blank.
Let’s just say I’ve done a lot of driving this semester. And as I’ve already mentioned, I reflect when I drive. The amount of time I have found myself just reflecting and remembering is honestly incredible, especially when I consider the amount of time spent working and sleeping,
Then again, I feel like that’s exactly what life is. It is remembering every bad, good, better, and worse event. It is comparing this moment of glory, to that moment of misery. It is sitting at my desk this past Friday wiping tears from my eyes as I read cards from students, and realize how much value you find in someone’s beliefs and thoughts and heart. It is driving home after school, realizing I am selfish and high maintenance, indeed. It is me holding a Christmas gift from a friend, and finding a lot more meaning in what they wrote in their card, which is what my ten-year-old self would have never imagined. Life is about embracing moments like today where I felt empty and full, all at once.
I drove home from a soccer Christmas party, and I remembered this summer’s maiden voyage to Inez. I passed all of the same shops and houses, and instead of feeling afraid of what I was getting myself into, I felt peaceful. I saw a car I recognized, and passed different places that now had a story or two that accompanied physical appearance of physical structure. I knew names of families that built this or that, and I knew that the highway wasn’t leading to nowhere. It leads to the land that will eventually hold a new high school for Martin County. I turned onto New Route 3, and recognized that stress roll away from my shoulders. There’s my friend’s house, there’s that office building (gosh, I love those people), there’s that weird vacant lot, there’s that Zip Zone gas station. I’m home, and I also realize in these driving moments that home isn’t a place.
It cannot even be defined as “people,” because it is more than that. Home is friends already making fun of you before you even say the next dumb thing about your day. Home is acknowledging your flaws with people that love you and only want the best for you. Home is ignoring that awkward comment. Home is hugging your “adopted family.” Home is hating every second of that one Tuesday in November. Home is wishing you didn’t live here. Home is remembering her and him and them. Home is playing the game of LIFE with friends, and making connections to real stuff happening around you.
Home is wherever, whenever, and whoever that helps you realize you’re totally and completely alive. The lumps in your throat as your students go “shopping” through bags of clothes you never even wore. The tears that fall for no reason, and for every reason, all at once. The sound your refrigerator makes that scares you to death. The laughter you hear in your living room. The phone calls starting with “well, I haven’t heard from you in awhile, so I’m just checking in.” Home is all of it. And it is always, always changing.
Kentucky nights are darker than any place I’ve ever been, so I guess I got pretty lucky that I live behind that huge beacon of light in that darkness that just happens to be a gas station. I can’t get lost in that darkness, and even if I did, my life is full of other lights that would guide me. Thank you, if you’ve been one of those lights. I am forever indebted, and happily adding you to my ever changing “home.”
haliewanders 