Wherever it is You Call Home

We don't know where we'll live next, but if Dominic has his way it will be North Dakota. I don't know anything about North Dakota. It's not a state that was ever entered into any remote part of my list of places in which I'd like to think I might one day live. And truthfully, well--North Dakota? Seriously? Does that place even exist? Well, does it?

Because I don't know. Sometimes I still think I'm in Alabama. It doesn't seem like too much has changed. The weather's still basically the same; it's fall and I still have no use for the fall clothes they sell in department stores. I mean, seriously, what are they thinking, all those department stores, when they sell coats and sweaters and scarves and things made out of wool, of WOOL, in southern states? Who buys that stuff? In Alabama, people can sometimes wear shorts in DECEMBER. And even though I've only been in south Texas for two months, I'm betting that shorts-wearing-in-December sometimes happens here as well.

But as for this feeling I've been feeling lately--this feeling that this post is really all about--it's something like displacement, I think. Except I'm not sure because, like I said, I can't really shake away all the Alabama-ness that has assaulted me by incessant osmosis ever since I was born. Sometimes, at the onset of evening, I look out our balcony and I feel like I'm in an alien world because I'm hundreds of miles away from the place where I grew up, the place that I would leave, sometimes, for short periods of time and then always come back to. But now it's been two months. And I'm never going back.

At least not to stay. Because I should consider myself relatively rootless now. And that's a strange concept to someone who inherited roots and kept them and cultivated them and, truthfully, never really thought about them until it was all over, and they were severed, wavering, now, in the daydreams of a very recent past like giant phantasmagoric seaweed at the very bottom of a dark ocean.

But I suppose Texas really is different. I mean, this is a state where there are a lot of people who wear cowboy hats in one hundred percent serious earnestness.

And, also, you know what? I don't think I'd mind North Dakota, either. It's time for me to see the seasons change--and I mean really change, with all the blood bright leaves falling from the trees and the air getting colder every day. It's time for me to go to Gap, the Limited, Express, and buy sweaters and scarves. And coats and WOOL, WOOL!

And wear them all in fall.