Quarter of a Century

25 years ago, we trooped into Wake Forest on Labor Day, looking for hope and change. Two vehicles, loaded with everything we owned after the marathon yard sales in Illinois, it was my husband Skip pulling the U-Haul trailer, the two kids 12 and 4, and me at the ripe old age of 37. My father drove his broken down little pickup truck, loaded to the gills with our stuff. We looked like leftovers from a John Steinbeck novel.

I've lived within 20 miles of that first rented townhouse ever since. Twenty-five years.

You have to realize that until this time, I never lived anywhere very long. My first big move was from Cedar Falls, Iowa where I was born, to Evanston, Illinois at the age of six weeks. That set the stage for me to move 32 times in my first 30 years. I not only never put down roots, I barely broke the surface. So staying here in the Triangle and only changing domiciles 4 times in a quarter century is pretty amazing to me.

Yesterday, I accidentally took a trip down memory lane. It was not my intention. I had to be up that way to drop Mom off at Barb's house, and she suggested that there might be a new coffee shop on White Street in Wake Forest, so I swerved through town just to see. No coffee shop, but something about the gloomy day and the actual anniversary made me cruise through the streets looking for my old self. So much has changed. I left Wake Forest nearly ten years ago and it has been following valiantly in Cary's footsteps ever since. When we moved there in 1987, there were 4500 people, two places to eat (The Fountain and Shorty's), one take out pizza place (PTA) and plenty of churches. The churches have burgeoned, as have the eating establishments. It's a veritable emporium of big box stores and slick-looking shops these days, and thousands more people with cars.

The two houses where I lived are still there, though one, a sorry-looking shack on a main road, has a For Sale sign in front of it. I expected it to be torn down after I moved out, but he's squeezed another decade of low rent and no maintenance out of it.

Twenty-five years is a pretty long time, though it doesn't seem so as I look back over it. I moved there younger than my older child is now. That's a little startling.When Dad helped us load up and move, he was the age I am now. That's even weirder. The generations are collapsing.

1987. Did the world feel as breathlessly precarious as it does today? Probably. Were the politics as venomous, the citizens so divided, the way so uncertain? When I sift back through the decades, even the tumultuous years of my youth at the height of the Viet Nam War and the Civil Rights Movement, those are not the things that spring immediately to mind. Andrew was born shortly after the long, hot summer when Nixon resigned, but what I remember was living in that trailer, being way too hot, building projects for one of my classes, spending time with our best friends Michael and Cristi.

I marched in the war protests, I met with my women's collective, I agitated for legalizing abortion. I worked on local and gubernatorial campaigns in the seventies. I was passionate about the rights of women, improving the lot of children and public education. But those are not the things I remember now when I look back from my perch so many years later.

When I look back it's family I remember: my children being born, being toddlers and school kids. I remember the excitement when my parents would fly in from Europe during the summer and we'd get to spend time together. Vivid are the trips to Albia to see my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins. I think about starting my business on a $100 loan from Mom, and then keeping it going for almost 15 years. I remember friends and love and tears and divorce and love again. I don't remember politics.

I'm glad I've lived here in the South for twenty-five years. It was like a foreign country when I first moved here; I couldn't even understand what people were saying in the AA meetings in Wake Forest and Youngsville. But it gradually became home and if I spend the next twenty-five years living here, in this town, in this house even, that will be ok with me. The public life rages on and on, and always will. I'll pay attention and I'll sometimes get involved. But my real life, my true north, lies here in the dogwood trees and gentle cadences of the south, with my home, my wife and my family.