Began in 1967, when I left home in Georgia and moved to San Antonio. I was an eighteen-year-old bride and had no clue what Texas would be like; I pictured cowboys and hitching posts and saloons.
In the first two years, we lived on three tree-named streets: Magnolia, Mistletoe, and Huisache. What I remember most about those years is going to college, learning to cook and walking to the phone booths to call home, collect. We had no phone, no TV.
Because of a terrible crime spree in the city, we moved to Helotes: a small town on the outskirts of San Antonio. We rented a stone house on a 64-acre piece of land, complete with a motorcycle track and a creek. Both my children, Day and Will, were born when we lived in that house, and we could hear Willie Nelson singing (before he was famous) from our porch. We'd traded all our wedding silver for a dog, Tony, a forever playful German Shepherd.
After 28 years of marriage, I divorced and moved back into San Antonio--to what was then a rent house, and is now--thanks to my parents--my permanent home. It's not far from those three tree-named streets. Just today, I got a haircut a few houses from the house we lived in on Huisache--the house we left to avoid the crime spree of 1969. Our friends across the alley were not as lucky. When I walk or drive past those houses, I can almost see younger versions of ourselves through the windows.
The plan was to move back to Georgia. The plan was to build a cabin in the mountains of North Georgia. The plan was to be near family and friends. But those things never happened. Every time we left Georgia and headed west, I'd cry for miles. Finally, one day, Carlene said, "You're not going to move back here; you might as well make Texas your home."
As I drive around this city, and as I meet with friends--as I did tonight, going with Kate to see Twelve Years a Slave after eating at Tip Tops--I encounter memories on almost every street. The old Woodlawn Theater, we passed tonight, was where we went to see "art films" in the Sixties. The Bijou--where Kate and I saw the movie--is in the mall that used to be called Wonderland (where I went on the day I learned I was pregnant, 1971, to buy a yellow musical elephant that played "You Are My Sunshine." It's also where we sold silver spoons to buy a dog.)
When you "might as well" make a place your home, when you shift your energy from an original dream to a new one, you absorb the new place into your cells, your memories. You know your way around. It talks to you.
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