Moving Back, Moving On

Moving Back, Moving On

Judy Nickles

She never planned to go home again, at least not while she was still breathing. “If you don’t want to fertilize a tree with me, just dig a hole and drop me in. Don’t make a big deal of it.” She paid for everything in advance, had a marker placed in the last space of the family plot, and called it done.

She wasn’t sure when she began to think about returning upright and breathing, but the idea grew like a runaway weed. Six months and one monumental garage sale later, she found herself passing the city limits sign of her hometown. The population number looked bloated. She’d left an old country cowtown, and now it was a city.

She expected to feel a bit like a stranger, but once the word spread among former classmates, her phone never stopped ringing. They’d all known each other back when and still loved each other anyway.

Betty appointed herself the reorientation specialist. “Things have changed a lot, you know, Faye. You won’t recognize much.” Her forays into the deteriorated downtown struggling to reclaim itself both depressed and encouraged her. She wasn’t young anymore either. Maybe they’d make a comeback together—she and the empty buildings. She thought maybe she liked them better than the sprawling businesses gobbling up what had once been literally out of town.

She thought the new library looked like an alien spacecraft hovering on the corner which had been home to everyone’s favorite department store. Inside, the mustard, orange, and teal blue color scheme turned her stomach, but she got a new card anyway and eventually located a section of books she thought might occupy her spare time.

It seemed that the local offices she needed were no longer actually in City Hall but rather scattered around town like so many stray cats. It took a week to register her car, claim a homestead exemption for her property taxes, register to vote, and get a new driver’s license.

Betty recommended a bank because it had been one of three original town financial institutions, but it had a new name and location. Its ultra-modern interior lacked the gleaming marble balustrade which had always captivated her imagination whenever she got lucky enough to follow her mother inside to make a deposit. But they offered free checking for seniors and enough other perks to hook her.

The old telephone company had become loft apartments, but her cell had been sufficient for years anyway, and she didn’t need to change her service provider. She missed the row of downtown dime stores long since shuttered, but Betty showed her the back way from her new home to a Walmart. “Stay off the Loop,” she cautioned. “It’s a killer.” After one attempt to stay alive until she could exit, Faye believed her.

On the third Sunday she slipped into the church where she’d grown up but left shaking her head. The young minister’s short—very short—sermon had soothed her ears after a childhood of pulpit-pounding, but what had he said? She’d have to think about it.

She had precious little time to think though. So many activities at the retirement center, so many invitations to lunch and this meeting and that event, so many opportunities at the college—now a full-fledged university—and enough music programs to satiate her melodious bent.

Sadness permeated her soul when she passed historic homes-turned-offices. Others had simply disappeared. She wasn’t sure what hurt her soul most—the vacant overgrown lots or the tacky new edifices with no character.

Her old elementary school was gone; the junior high renamed to be politically correct; and the expanded high school campus looked like a metropolis.  In place of the hospital where she’d been born stood a medical center covering four city blocks. Navigating the maze inside made her wonder if it would be easier to stay sick than to try to find her doctor’s office.

The movie theater in which she’d spent so many Sunday afternoons before walking on to church huddled in the shadows as if ashamed to be so shabby and deserted. She was, Faye thought, a grand old lady fallen on hard times. From what she heard, all attempts to renovate the historic building (which shared her birth date though not the same year) had failed due to lack of funds and interest.

Sometimes while navigating the still familiar streets, divested of their old bricks in favor of asphalt which radiated unbearable heat, she wondered if she was really home at all. That idea would bear some thought and investigation, too. Still, here and now exceeded then and there.

She’d lived her life in so many different places and called them home for a time. She knew this place would forever. No more moves lurked in her future. Yet, calling it home seemed strange.

She visited her favorite Mexican restaurant regularly and found an oasis of comforting familiarity. She’d known the location as a drugstore luring shoppers inside for a cherry Coke on a hot summer day.

But now she needed to strike a balance between her memories and the present reality. Had she never left…had she changed with the town over the years…had she known nothing else but its boundaries…she could achieve that balance more easily.

In the early morning when she woke to doves cooing, and on still evenings when the cicadas whirred in the mesquites, something stirred in her spirit. They heralded home in a way nothing else did. She savored those moments most of all.

Bit by bit, day by day, season by season, she settled in, finding comfort in the pictures of her mind. She learned to find the recognizable in the divergent, whether a street corner or old bricks peeking from beneath a building’s modern façade.

If Santa didn’t still land in a helicopter to toss candy to children at Christmas, the Mariachi bands still played during the season. If congested traffic intruded on her errands, the radio still blared country western music. If the bargain basement no longer existed in the demolished department store, small struggling businesses offered a warm welcome.

If the downtown streets weren’t full of people, the ones who frequented them seemed hopeful. If the parks were no longer safe havens for solitary browsers in the twilight, they still retained their serene beauty in the sunshine. If men no longer wore Stetsons and tipped them to the ladies, an occasional one held a door for her and smiled. She could live with that.

The epiphany came to her while stopped for a red light at what had been one of the busiest intersections in town. If her hometown was different now, well, so was she. She’d come into the town a stranger, and now she’d returned a stranger. But just as she’d grown up to love it from infancy, she could grow old and love it again.

It cradled her past. It enveloped her now. It would carry her into the future.