Southbound Train

Being Neighborly

Everything blooms in spring … including neighbors, it seems. People we’ve lived near all winter have suddenly started appearing everywhere – walking dogs and kids, swimming at the newly opened pool, chatting in the intersections. The sun came out and so did all the people, emerging from the cold ground and warm houses like so many happy tulips. We don’t have North East serious winters here, but we have enough cold and inhospitable days that the arrival of warm breezes really feels like a new beginning. I never understood how the change of seasons could make that much difference in how people lived and interacted, but now, suddenly, I do – realization, again, that California really is a one-season state. The sense of blooming here now that it is warm is amazing.

I found myself playing Easter Bunny this year, organizing the neighborhood egg hunt for close to 30 small people armed with baskets and ferocious competition for plastic eggs. This bunny takes donations from parents, so the Friday before the hunt our driveway was a clearing house for people dropping off bags of eggs. The cooler was so full I had to empty it twice and it was fun to see people as they came and went. Having never lived in a neighborhood like this I was enchanted with the whole idea of neighborhood events; needless to say I enjoyed being a part of it. The hunt itself went well, though Mike and I struggled to hide 300+ eggs in time. We had cute prizes for the golden eggs and I wore my very fluffy bunny ears and tried with minimal success to direct the hordes. I didn’t realize how many kids there actually were in the ‘hood, but it was fun to meet them and their parents and marvel at how amazingly polite and well behaved the huge majority were. I’m planning for a Halloween party next, complete with fortune tellers and dry ice punch. I think I may have missed my calling as a Girl Scout mom.

One of our neighbors is expecting twins and has been on bed rest – out came an email asking for help, and a group of us signed up to keep her and her family fed while she stayed off her feet. Coming from a place where I didn’t know my neighbors, and probably couldn’t have even identified by sight 75% of the people who lived within a square block of me, the fact that so many people took on the care and feeding of a neighbor was both shocking and touching. I gladly carried my enchiladas down the street and thought how nice it was to live in a place where people actually look out for each other.

We kicked off summer socializing two weeks ago with a cocktail party on Friday night. Mike made mint juleps and we ended up with a huge group of people who stuck around until well after 10, enjoying the company and the warm evening and the pleasure of being outside with nothing else to do. We’ve been talking about hosting cocktail hour “once it got warm” so it was a pleasure to put it into practice and spend some totally unstructured time enjoying our neighbors. Someone else picked up the torch this week and we were happy to walk down the road and hang out again. I’ve been told that this neighborhood is unique in its desire to socialize but I prefer to think of it as a Tennessee thing. Regardless of whether we “got lucky” with the neighborhood or with the state in general, we’re excited by the social life that is beginning to develop. Often when we drive the back way home or go for a wander in the car, I look at the great houses on many acres of rolling horse pastures and think that we should have bought something like that. In a similar fashion, I daydream about all the great old houses in the long established Nashville neighborhoods whenever we drive into town… but now that we’re getting to know people, having Friday night drinks and casual Tuesday dinners and ‘oh, stop by and chat’ afternoons, I’m so pleased that we chose a neighborhood instead – this neighborhood, in particular. Like the small nose and big family I’ve talked about wanting, I’ve also always wanted a sitcom-style block party neighborhood, and I just might have lucked into one. I’m thrilled!

Time Flies when you’re having Family

That’s the saying, right? It has been a busy sort of spring and now summer is here based on the heat and the thunderstorms and the masses of fireflies hovering above the grass as dusk.  Spring was different this second go ‘round, later and colder and much much wetter than last year. My neighbors assure me that it was “an odd spring” and I’ll take that, because the warmer weather was well overdue in my book when it started showing up in late May. April and May just ran together this year, and we were either away or hosting people more nights than not, the big event being the titular Family Fun that swept into town in honor of my Grandma’s 91^st birthday in late April.

I’ve always yearned for curly hair, a retrousse nose, fine bone structure and a huge family – I imagined I’d marry a man with many siblings and cousins and I would end up with nieces and nephews and a house full of crazy at the holidays. Toss in a perm and a plastic surgeon and I’d be three out of four. Clearly we’ve had epic fail on all counts there, particularly with the nose, but Mike’s small family didn’t really help my case either. When life hands you a paucity of lemons, can you still make lemonade? Our little reunion in April proved that yes, yes you can. It has been a long time since we’ve all been together for more than a few hours, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t more than a few hours nervous about the whole situation. Would we have anything to talk about? Would we argue? Would we be bored? Would they be horrible guests and I a horrid host? Could the house handle sleeping 8? The list of possible pitfalls was tremendous but in the actuality, the worst kerfluffle came simply when Diane tried to hang Grandma’s purse on the back of her chair. That. Simply. Wasn’t. Acceptable.  I’ll challenge any of you to try that little maneuver and keep your hand. A-hem.

Mostly we laughed. A lot. We talked about family history both ancient and recent, set some records straight, recalled Christmases past and considered Christmases future. We drank … well, like fishes. We ate lots of BBQ and lots of Meat & Three and lots of food in general. PK and I reproduced (mostly) the famous Czech Grandmom “buchte” but will live to perfect the recipe. Martha White and her Yeasty Buns featured prominently, as did that most Nashville of events – the Grand Ole Opry.  There was discussion of all living near each other here in this most green of places any of us have ever lived; I think it was our collective European heritage telling us that real people live on fertile farmland, not in the desert.

Maybe the nicest part of the whole weeklong endeavor was that PK and I became friends in a way that was never possible as kids growing up six years and 500 miles apart. We discovered that we share oddities in common that we’ve chalked up entirely to shared genetics, not the least of which being a love of cooking and a sick need to take the scrawniest plant in the nursery home so that it won’t die lonely on the shelf. I’m angling for him to move here and meet some nice Southerner and settle down so that we can look forward to not just a few holidays a year but instead a nice lifetime of Sunday BBQs and bourbon drinking and riotous living, indeed.

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Speaking of riotous living… we celebrated Mother’s Day just a few weeks after the birthday bash by having both our moms here for a road trip to Memphis & Mississippi. We were on the Elvis trail, and we did it up right – a night at the Peabody and front row seats at the Duck Parade, blues on Beale, Lemon Icebox Pie (from Charlie Cavallos Cupboard, natch) and Tupelo to see where the whole Elvis thing began.

In keeping with the wet spring we had plenty of rain that weekend, soaking us thoroughly in Oxford and keeping the car wet all the way to Tupelo. There isn’t much along the side of the road to look at in northern Mississippi but green vines and trees and now at least we know why they are so green. We did stop and look at some great old antebellum homes and learn about the poor Chickasaws who clearly got the short end of the stick. We had a surprisingly good dinner in an extraordinarily funky restaurant, played Hearts, visited a Frank Lloyd Wright house in Alabama and drove home along the Natchez Trace, mile after mile of swooping green parkway and little history and nature stops.  At one point we took the “Old Trace” loop for 3 miles, barely rolling along a barely paved road that took us into a stand of trees so dense that the filtered light was, scouts honor, green. We stopped the car and got out and the silence was amazing, filled with little bits of sound that I’d never notice in a populated place. Rustling leaves and settling gravel, but also tiny breaths of breeze, flowers unfolding, bees pollinating, dust motes settling down on lichen covered rocks and my own inner voice, whispering softly that I was home, home, home.

Somewhere in the last month of visitors and travel and chaos, something about here has become home. I don’t know if it was showing off how pretty it is (Stupidly, like I have something to do with the rolling hills or the cardinals or the dogwoods… geez. All I can take any marginal credit for were the masses of tulips in the front yard) or telling people about it or driving to Memphis twice in the space of one week and feeling how different it is from here. Maybe it was the house guests or the plane rides or the sweet relief of getting off an airplane and being done. Maybe it was surviving, and sleeping, my first two nights alone in the house, but whatever it was, something’s gone to the green side and this feels more like home and less like trying. I’ve got house guests galore in the coming months, so we’ll see how entrenched I feel by then. Maybe some of them will stay. Maybe I’ll manage to recruit the family entirely. One can hope. Home is expansive.

One Year, +2

Spring is a fickle, fickle girl. The tulips are blooming and the peas have come up and this morning we had hail and a tornado watch. A year ago today the movers delivered our furniture and I sat on the front steps marking off boxes and getting sunburned, oblivious to the fact that Tennessee was showing us a kindness in weather; today we had patio chairs delivered in a deluge and I didn’t even venture outside to sign for them.  Daffodils were the first calling card spring delivered this year, glowing swaths of gold that appeared out of nowhere. Then came the Bradford Pear trees, giant white hydrangeas floating midair. The redbuds started next, violet vitality in otherwise bare woods. Then, much to my surprise, the cherry trees were covered in pink frosting. Driving into the neighborhood last April, I contracted my first case of keeping up with the neighbors at the sight of a weeping cherry in every front yard. I promptly planted my own and watched it bloom this year – a full week earlier than I expected. Returning from California, I see there are dogwoods coming into their own now, much sooner than last year…. But we are still bare branched in most places, far more so than I remember a year ago, and I’m wondering where the leaves are. Of course, I’m wondering where we are, too, so the leaves might just be a side effect.

We left Altadena early on April 5th last year, pulling out of town in on a dreary morning in a car packed with unhappy animals and no shortage of mixed emotions. We had to drive (flying with Guinea Pigs is not recommended), but it turned out that the drive was the best thing we could have done for ourselves. The abrupt nature of air travel doesn’t lend itself to life transitions, and I don’t know that I would have been as mentally balanced as I was about the move had our first steps in Tennessee as residents had been on the tarmac rather than at the Visitors Welcome Center off I65. The slow transfer of 2000 miles from ahead to behind let us ease into the idea that we were leaving the west “for real.” The landscape felt familiar through Texas, but somewhere in Oklahoma it began to change, and by the time we woke up last April 8th in Missouri, I knew that we had really left home behind. The final day of driving was the hardest and the closer we got the more knotted my stomach became, but under the knot was also a relief that we were almost done, that we’d made it, that we were starting a whole new adventure once we parked. True or not, I managed to transfer my desire to stop moving to a desire to be here; a cheap trick, but it worked.

A year later, we stepped off a plane and onto that tarmac and I felt as disoriented as though I had never driven the lonely road from there to here. I don’t know that my timing of a trip to California (our first real visit) could have been much worse than to coincide with our anniversary of moving; I spent my time there in an odd haze of feeling like I was home, and my week here since being back in an even odder haze of feeling like I am home. I’d like to make like a guinea pig and get in my chube and stay there until the confusion passes. LA felt very big to me, and busy, and dirty, all things I never really noticed until I’d lived somewhere green and small town and hey, y’all, stop in the middle of street and chat. The persistence of the green here means we don’t have dry roadsides and barren strips – our grass covers more sins. On the other hand, I saw the silhouette of palm trees against a darkening sky, the shape of downtown and the presence of the mountains and I could have cried at the LA-beauty of it all, brash and bare and kind of ugly, except that is isn’t at all.

There were moments, no doubt, when I fervently wished for the life I had left behind to be restored to me, right now, click the heels on the ruby slippers, I’m home. I miss fitting in, having friends, knowing where to go and who to call and wow, the sheer variety of choice on one street. I miss my friends terribly, and saying goodbye to them was just as painful as ever – maybe more, because now I know what it is to live without them. It was odd to know that life there has just marched on, steadily, while we’ve been here moving forward in jolts and spurts and sometimes completely sitting still. There were also moments when I thought how lucky we were to be living here, in the midst of all of this green, with the bulbs blooming and my garden planned, the neighborhood we’re beginning to feel a part of and the space to breathe. I find it easier to let life unfold here without as much strain; my feathers are ruffled less than they used to be. I enjoy getting less worked up, but I do worry if it means I’m getting soft, the Aimee equivalent of Mike driving around Pasadena like a Tennessean, slowly and with consideration for others.

I guess the sum of it is that I don’t wish we’d stayed, but I’m not 100% glad we left. A year isn’t really enough to sort through all the permutations of a complete uprooting of life; it is silly of me to have expected the heavens to open with a proclamation one way or another on April 8th, one year later. I’m still enjoying the differences, still missing the familiar. Maybe it will always be that way – I’ll always be from California in some inalterable way, though I am starting to identify with the things that drew me to Tennessee. I’m waiting until summer, I think, to have truly been here a year anyway. This spring is different from what we saw last year, and besides, we spent all of last year’s spring moving boxes and exploring Home Depot. This year I plan to soak it up, spending more time outside building a garden than indoors building a home. When summer rolls around and I can look outside and say, ah, yes, I remember this, then I’ll consider myself one year gone. Besides, isn’t the honeymoon period two years?

A prelude to considering a year

I’m trying my hardest to remember if there were more leaves when we arrived on this day last year, or less. I know there were more cherry blossoms, less dogwood flowers and a significantly larger quantity of boxes and unknowns. Probably a similar amount of emotional upheaval, since I managed to plan our first trip back to California since moving to coincide with a year of living here, making April 8 the day of arrival in Tennessee times two. I have things to say about this, I think, but if I arrived a year ago today overwhelmed and excited, today just finds me exhausted from a red eye and wishing for the soft embrace of the pillow. The internet connection allows for posting, but the mental capacity has nothing more to say than “ohh, look at the pretty tulips in my front yard.”

More tomorrow.

Spring Report #6

Spring Report #5

Spring Report #4

Spring Report #3

Spring Report #2

Northbound, Southbound, whatever...

…. That damn train that runs behind the house needs to be muzzled. We think they are working on the tracks during the day, so the train is running at night. It has an erratic schedule on the best of weeks, and usually I don’t notice it, but all week it has gone by just as I am dropping off to sleep (so somewhere around midnight) and the driver is working hard to make sure he is wide awake. If I hear that damn whistle blow (who came up with that, whistle? It isn’t a whistle, it is a honking horn, loud enough to startle the pigs, make the cat yowl and wake Mike from deep sleep, which is really saying something) ONE MORE TIME at midnight I’m calling the railroad and complaining.

I understand the whistle, or the horn, or whatever we’re going to call it. There are two crossings on either side of our neighborhood that are un-guarded. Each is about a mile from the house, and I do understand that the HORN needs to be sounded to warn the unwary. Both these roads are so lightly travelled during the day, though, that I can’t imagine a steady stream of traffic is tying up the tracks at midnight… A few short honks would do the trick, but I think the driver is hitting the horn at one crossing a mile to the north and leaning on it ALL THE WAY through to the other crossing a mile to the south.

Two miles of earsplitting horn in the middle of the night gets old, train guy. And I guarantee you that the one little dinky farm road in the middle – the one right opposite our house with the rusty gate and lock that has clearly rusted shut? Yeah, no one is crossing the tracks on a tractor right there. Especially not at midnight.  That extra burst of sound you like to lay on for the benefit of that potential farmer? Pretty unnecessary. So lay off the horn, already. It isn’t like it is as cool as the mournful hoooooonk of the Monorail. And until it is, SHUT IT.