Homesick (26 page)

I think back to yesterday, about halfway through the ride. I’d walked down to the dining car for lunch. The seating for meals on these long-distance trains is communal; if there’s a chair that’s free, you take it. I’m naturally reserved, and it isn’t easy for me to open up with strangers. Whenever I’ve gone to a new church, I have always awaited with dread the moment when you turn to the person next to you, shake hands, and say, “May peace be with you.” I never have gotten used to sharing my solitude that way. But the day before, while boarding, I’d met a charming couple named Penny and Skip, who’d been married for twenty-five years; now here they were at a table for four, and I was glad to sit down with them for a quiet lunch.

A few minutes later, a fourth traveler came along to join us. She was a lovely woman, her hair long and splattered with gray, clipped back at the base of her neck and falling gracefully down below her shoulders. Her face was etched with beautiful lines; they made me wonder whether her life had been a hard one, or simply long.

Her name, she told us, was Jean. She said she was from Pontchatoula, Louisiana, but as she talked I realized her accent was also laced with something else. When I asked, she told us she’d come from London many years before. Our food arrived, and Jean took a moment to bow her head and silently thank God for her meal.

Jean told us this was her first trip without her husband; she’d lost him a few months before, after forty-five years. Together we talked about how hard it is to suffer such a loss. And I remembered something my cousin Tom, the Episcopal minister, told me once: that everyone has a burden that seems just a little too much to bear.

Daddy is selling our childhood home. He doesn’t want to live there anymore, and I guess I can’t blame him. Jenna is taking it hard; whenever she’s come back to Meridian to visit, she has always slept in her old room there, though she knows there’s always space for her at the farm. I thought I would be just as sentimental about the old house, but I find that I’m not. I take my consolation in the fact that we can give Daddy a place out here with us. He’s designing a cabin he’ll soon build on the farm; he’s moved his drafting board into the Rose Cottage, where he’s taken up residence until his new home is ready. After all these years, Daddy has finally stopped drinking and I’m so proud of him; he looks great these days, and to see his face now is to realize what an immense strain he was bearing during the last decade of Mama’s life. Daddy’s at ease now, and I’m grateful for it.

We work a bit at Daddy’s that Saturday, boxing things up, and later on I stop by Hope Village to visit the kids. Then it’s back to the farm. Jenna and her friend Indra have flown in from Florida, and my friend Martee has flown back down from Philadelphia. After a supper of steaks on the grill at the Rose Cottage, we all stretch out in the living room to listen to the frogs on the pond, and enjoy the restorative charm of a cool spring evening.

The loss of Mama is still fresh in our minds, and before long Jenna and I are talking about where we go from here. What happens to your idea of home, Jenna wonders out loud, when one of your parents dies? After relying on your mother or father throughout your life, how do you go about finding what you need within yourself?

“It’s as though my own house has fallen down, and I’m having to build it back up, one brick at a time,” I say. “And I know it’ll be stronger, and the strength Mama gave me will help me rebuild. Still,” I chuckle, “I wish I had an architect.”

“Sela, you’ve been remodeling that house, so to speak, since you got married and had kids,” Martee says. “You say your mama gave you the strength, and even if she didn’t give you all the tools you need, your daddy’s sure handing down a few good ones—confidence, bravery, that sense of self-worth. It’s no wonder you want to reconnect with what you were blessed with here. That’s where all your character comes from.”

But there’s something else I’ve been worried about, I tell them. My mama may not have had much truck with sentimentality, but I’m just the opposite—and I know it. Sometimes I look at Mississippi through lenses as rosy as our little one-room cottage. And I get carried away in the other direction, too: I’m just as prone to convincing myself everyone in Hollywood is soulless as I am to believing that small-town living is a universal cure.

“I know how warm my family and friends in Meridian make me feel,” I say. “But Austin and Anabella are growing up, and making friends, and Howard and I are starting to make friends with their parents. And I don’t know if it’s just wishful thinking, but I keep hoping something more lasting will come of all that, too. After all, these kids’ life stories are going to be blending together for years to come—on football weekends, class trips, prom dates. And most of the parents we’ve been spending time with actually seem able to leave their work behind at the office. Maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on L.A. The days of me spending more time with my TV family and friends than the ones I have in real life are over. Life is too short to keep letting my career have free rein over my life.”

Jenna goes into the kitchen to put some coffee on. “You know what I think, Sela?” she says. “I know what this connection with your hometown means to you, and I think you’re right about it. But I also think what you’re looking for is a way to find what you’ve been missing, and bring it into your life in L.A. If you keep reaching out and building those friendships, and putting the time in on the home front to build relationships within your own family—well, chances are, you can. I’m not sure it matters all that much where you’re doing it. All those things you love about the South, those things that feed your soul—the kindness, the consideration, the intimacy of lifelong friendships—they’re yours for the making. You didn’t leave that behind when you left Mississippi. You can carry it all with you, wherever you go.”

“It’s like what they say,” Martee chimes in. “If you want to have faith, start behaving as if you did, and you’ll be surprised how easy it comes.”

That night I lay awake in my bed, staring at the ceiling fan turning in the moonlight and thinking of this conversation in light of all I have learned in the wrenching year that has just passed. What have I been looking for, I wonder? The perfect blend of old and new, of childhood and adulthood, of home and away? Surely by now I must have realized how imperfect life is—a reality that has created fear in me. Fear I’m trying to escape—that old dread of failure, of disappointment, of not fitting in, and of being less than perfect. But fear is only an old and cunning trickster, and that’s
all
it is.

It is time to realize that I may always feel a little out of place, no matter where I am. Maybe that’s true for all of us, that fitting in is a fantasy, a wish that is sustained by the uncomfortable feeling of not fitting in. My longing for home—to be among the people and places I love—is real and true, but clicking your heels together and saying “There’s no place like home” only works in the movies. The Meridian I long to return to—and the idyllic childhood I remember—is impossible to fully recapture; indeed, it may never have been as perfect as I remember. Maybe the price we pay for moving on in life is this very nostalgic, bittersweet awareness of what we’ve left behind. What I’ve come to realize is that I must work to weave the past and the present into a secure fabric for my future—my own and my family’s. First September 11 and then my mother’s death illuminated a deeper knowledge that we are only given a brief moment in time to embrace the greatest challenge we face: to create an inner home for our true self.

I fell asleep as I always do when I’m far from home, thinking of Howard and my children. My life. My all.

A couple of days later, the rest of the Sherman clan arrived from the big city, and we all set out with my brother Berry’s family and our kids for a trip down the murky Chunky River. The Chunky is the river of my youth; floating down along its waters in an inflatable raft is second nature to me, as exciting as a ski trip and as intensely pleasurable as a warm bath. I had a ball, the way I always do. Howard’s still getting used to it, but Berry and his family love it as much as I do; his kids were in and out of the water the whole way, playing like fish.

My kids were hanging on for dear life.

Austin has always been a cautious child. He’s thoughtful, tentative; he looks before he leaps. And he’s as precociously analytical as his father. Even when he was just a few years old, and we were trying to get him to make the adjustment from using a baby swing to sitting up in a chair, he looked up at me and said matter-of-factly, “Mom, I could fall off and hurt myself.”

But in the last year or two, I think he’s finally coming into his own down here—making sense of the environment, internalizing the rhythms. He’s starting to own the place a little more. That day on the Chunky we pulled off onto the shore for a picnic, into an incredibly beautiful little area. And there on the tree was a spectacle he’d never seen before: catalpa worms. They’re funny little creatures, from the caterpillar family; cut in half and turned inside out, I’m told, they make perfect bait. (I wouldn’t go near one myself, but down in the South ladies are still allowed to be a little squeamish.) Two years ago I don’t think Austin would have had anything to do with a catalpa worm. But now he was fascinated, turning it over and over, letting it crawl up his hand. “Can I keep it?” he said, and I could not have been more thrilled.

When we got back in the boat to finish the run, Austin still looked a little wary of the water. He’s a city kid, after all, and it’s hard to blame him—the Chunky is one of our Mississippi-style muddy-water rivers, and there’s no telling what kind of squishy things a pair of little feet might find on the floor. None of that seemed to bother his cousins, though, and finally I think their fearless adventures got the better of him. At last he made it out of the boat, and into that muddy water. And the look on his face—pride, and terror, and a little edge of giddiness—was all I needed to see.

Austin’s just turning eight, and there’s nothing I enjoy more than watching him. He’s at that point where he’s still very much a little boy, with a teddy bear and a bunch of stuffed animals still keeping him company—but he’s starting to get a little too old for Mom to go kissing him in public the way she used to. Lately I think he’s getting a little more comfortable in his own skin, too, throwing around a football, running around with his shirt off like his uncle Brock. His indoctrination into sports came back home in California, where school keeps him involved every season. But his real love of playing—that stay-out-all-day-for-the-sake-of-it excitement Uncle Joe talks about—is something I notice most down here.