Cicadas compete with mockingbirds in the south and, largely, they win. Or do I not hear cicadas at all? Mockingbirds mock, after all, and who’s to say our bird-friends aren’t hidden by the hundreds in branches, crouched low, green eyes alight, and letting out ZZZZZT-ZZZZT-ZZZZZTs of insectoid mimicry?
It’s too hot and humid to care.
For I mirrored the cicadas, all red-eyed from jetlag and droning out dismay every time I walked into the sun. Every hour threatened thunderstorm, on and off, during my week in Auburn, Alabama. I was in from overseas as a one-week college student; the kick-off to a grad school program where my presence skewed up the town’s median age of 26. I’d be gone before the proper students arrived. The only other presence during my Residency week were the young and hopeful sorority girls, all grouped together with matching-hair and posing with their Tooman’s milkshakes, their teeth bright and smiles large, even as the humidity ate at the back of all our necks. There must be some parallel to these young adults descending upon Auburn as the similarly aged cicadas came out of the ground to scream and parade about campus. Our Sisters were sugaring up for Rush Week, a concept completely foreign to me and vaguely menacing in title.
Who rushes in the summer? It’s winter that quickens my step, with my head low and coat up, thinking fuck-fuck-fuck as I walk as brisk as possible from one heated dwelling to another. Though, even those sharp winters are coming to an end.
Life is changing for me.
Moving lingers and I need to start thinking about where I’m to roost next. You know it’s time to go when you start looming over a map and letting your finger trace state borders and tap-tap at cities. Thinking: Denver, Atlanta, Portland, or Seattle, but not home, not yet. Maybe one day, but not yet.
I’ve chained myself to grad school and I want to chain myself to more once I finally touch back down stateside. My years of float are ending. I’m Alabama-bound thrice a year for the next two years, circling Residency then skating back online for a weekly class from one to three am. I’ve set a commitment.
No sooner was I in Alabama, that I turned wing to head to Boston for a brief stopover before flying back to Europe.
My book of choice was Christian Cooper’s Better Living through Birding: Notes from a Black Man in the Natural World, if you’re wondering why my post is so bird heavy.
I arrived in time for my mom’s sixtieth surprise party and spent the morning setting up, then smiling as people stopped to tell me that my mom was going to be so surprised that I was here too. Though she wouldn’t be; she knew I was up, she only didn’t know about the party. Two-surprises would be far too much for my mother. It’d go from something pleasant to a burden of her trying to figure out where to house her eldest car-less daughter for five days. Still, we surprised her perfect, mostly thanks to everyone else. I did little but show up, take in the cake my sister lovingly made, and man the grill for thirty people.
From the moment of shouting surprise at my confused mother to her quick draw of her sunglasses to hide her tears, I sped through a New England summer. I cracked lobster with her fellow 55+ neighbors and struggled to keep up with an arthritic man who had consumed lobster for long he could do it with ease, shaking hands be dammed. My friend came up for leftovers the next day, we went down to the beach, then did a drive-by of Plymouth rock. A day a later and I was back taking the commuter rail on route to Boston, listening as Cooper told me of his exploits as a comic-writer, 9-11, and his birding community in Central Park. I piggybacked off Cooper’s obviously personal spiritual journey of seeing four wonders of the world by lazily staking down a green flag of ‘Want to Go’ right atop Uluru on Google maps.
At South Station, I became nostalgic while walking the same route to the park that I’d walked a hundred times before, some ten years ago, when I was commuting to Suffolk thrice-weekly on the Worcester line.
My old migration route. My old stomping ground. The streets and buildings were long-rooted, but most of the storefronts were stamped out and replaced with new fads. Summer street turned to winter street. I looked around, startled by how small it all felt. How short the walk was. When I first walked this road, back when I was a young and hopeful highschooler trying to pick a college, I had gone silent at the sight of Downtown Crossing. The buildings dazzled me with mass and connection. It felt so alive, so populated, so not-like-the-suburbs. I thrived in Boston, then I grew tired of Boston, so I left.
I went to Europe, where my first sight of a castle made my eyes water and my mind feel ice-skating clear with delight. I moved to Germany and walked the cobbled streets, listened to church bells, and ate Doner at 11 pm on a muggy summer night after a beer festival. Until it started to fill me with less and less wonder. Until one castle became the same as a thousand others and I started thinking that, as much as I love the city I currently live in, in fact, as much as I love Germany, it does feel rather small – doesn’t it?
Small?
How do behemoths shrink? How can a cathedral that took eighty years to build and cost the lives of workers become the backdrop of my picture of a cute dog? When do museums start to blur together? Why does life go stale as bread? I don’t want to lose that wonder. I catch it in glimpses now, whenever I’m hiking, and I pray that at least nature will stay – that nature, if nothing else, will keep me gasping.
So I want to move to a state that’s full of nature.
When will nature feel small? What comes after nature?
I’m going to be chasing that feeling all my life, I suppose. That, or I will eventually realize that novelty doesn’t bring anything but a brief bit of drunken happiness that soon fades away and leaves you hungover. But how can anybody fight against it? I want to be the kind of person that, one day, is happy staying put. The only thing is, unless something comes at me, I’ll have to break my own wings to stop myself from going, going, and be gone.
That’s the tradeoff – when you stay high and distant, you risk seeing things to small. You risk losing out on the day to day of your family, your friends, your home. Just as my Uber driver lamented to me about. He hadn’t been home for more than a handful of times in the past decade and his family was older now, rooted now, and changed now. His father was buried now. But where was he and where was I?
We were in a car at night leaving Logan airport, both of us looking out the window and thinking of what it means to be home.
Livejournal + 