Thirteen years ago if someone had told me I would live in Decatur, Alabama I would have not only had to look at a map to see where it was, I would not have believed them.
Thirteen years from now, if God gives me the good fortune to see that day, I will probably remember Decatur, Alabama almost like the back of my hand.
It can feel emotionally jarring at times, like some time-turned-tornado of my internal world.
There are places we remember; places and people we will never forget.
Today, I was able to reach my sweet elderly friend Hellen this evening–a woman who has become like a mother to me in many ways, whom I check on each night. Hellen was sitting in the dark without power, safe and having eaten. She told me of the tree limbs down in her yard and the darkness at the farmhouse across the road.
I’m familiar with that farmhouse–the places where long-needled pine falls that I was welcomed to rake up for my gardens, and in my mind’s eye I can still see the inside of their chicken coop where I was first acquainted with these creatures and was convinced I would do just fine caring for them while the family was on vacation one year.
I can hear the tornado sirens in my mind’s ear, and recall the feel and the silence before such storms. I can see the color of the sky, smell the air in my mind’s senses.
When I first came back north in 2020, I had this strange sense that I could go out into my vehicle (actually, my friend’s vehicle I was temporarily borrowing for a time) and drive fifteen minutes into downtown Decatur. It was just so emotionally disorienting, and when I walked outside at the place I was temporarily staying in my hometown for my first forty-nine years of life, there was another type of time-turned-tornado disorientation of my internal world.
Maybe this is what it would feel like to be in some type of coma for eight years and to wake up to all that has changed. Only, during the coma you were actually and equally fully awake in your very real life.
I know, that doesn’t make sense, perhaps. Only to me, does it make sense.
I suppose these types of things cannot be well-articulated. Some people move and travel easily in this world–others like me seem to attach to places in a different way.
As I spoke with the dear Miss Hellen on the phone (or to me, simply Hellen), I brought up this video on my computer and was watching and turned it up so she could hear it, too, some eight-hundred miles north through our phone connection. During the video, her power came back on.
After we said our daily “Goodnight, I love you’s” I was a bit pensive–places like Caddo, Trinity, The Beltline, Moulton, Highway 22, Ingalls Harbor and various images were echoing in my mind’s sensory-bank of memories, both good and difficult.
Thank you, Sweet Home Alabama, for all that you enriched me with–I will never forget you.
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