My heritage is one part swampy New Orleans and one part sunny southern California, but parental bloodlines aside, it's a multitude of twining stems rooted always in North Carolina soil. And if we move in a few months, like we say we will, back up to a soft rainy city at the farthest diagonal from the place that's left this red clay stuck permanently between my toes, I don't know when I'll ever find the time to make it back home. I need to sink my teeth into the South; I need to spend an autumn pedaling through cooling air and crisp leaves and the desolation and new growth and beauty and sly appeal of these musty green places.
Everything always seems so urgent, and every decision sometimes tastes too sharply of the regrets of every path not taken.
It's too easy here in Chicago to accept invitations and then forget to show up. It's too easy to blame the July heat or the February snow for my lethargy. My sniffly nose and swelling throat trapped me sweating at home this weekend, but for sporadic bouts of alleyway shopping and trips to the garden store to haul soil back for transplanting hundreds of small beautiful basil plants into tires and pots and trays and anywhere they'd fit with just a little more distance from each other. They transplant so well; they shrug and smile up towards the sun, wait for water and jam their toes even more firmly into this new earth.
If only, so many things.
I might quit my job for a month, or more, and ease this need for new skies, for the coasts I'm used to, before we strike out westward and leave it all even farther behind.
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