I have officially survived nearly six weeks in Dixieland, with four and a half more weeks til I move to Chicago.
Right after my last blog, I had a week of family time. Our Christthanksgivingmas 2011 weeklong celebration went well. As my family has aged, either we've gotten saner or we behave better because it's so infrequent for us all to be together. Whatever the reason, it was a good week. My brother and his girlfriend, Hollie, flew over from Corvallis, OR and my sister came here from Carbondale, CO. Once I move to Chicago, my family will have successfully taken over all four time zones! Next goal: let's start taking over the continents. Dibs on Antarctica.
Anyways, after the week of Christthanksgivingmas, I decided I needed to take a little break from SC. I've started carving out a small niche here for myself, but it still isn't home, and I wanted to go spend time with a couple of friends who also inhabit these strange Southern lands. Also, all this time down here without having friends nearby has been so odd. I needed a living, breathing reminder that my friends still exist in this world!
So, a week after my siblings left Summerville, I hopped in the car for my last solo roadtrip before moving to Chicago. [Sidenote: in the last month and a half, I've roadtripped through 9 states and driven about 2,423 miles! Oh, how I'll miss my car in Chicago.] I drove South on I-95 til Jacksonville, FL, then cut across the panhandle on I-10 to Pensacola, FL. If you're from the North and want to know what driving across the FL panhandle is like, picture driving across Ohio, only it's a good bit warmer and sunnier. I-10 is dreadfully flat and boring, and I decided very quickly that I'd be finding a different route home.
I reached Pensacola that evening a little after sunset and found my friend Kristen's home. I met Kristen at Mission Meadows five and a half years ago (yikes! I am getting up there in years...). She was a senior at Grove City College at the time, and I was going into my sophomore year at Allegheny. I consider her my first real "grown-up" friend. After graduating from Grove City, she got a grown-up job and an apartment of her own. Meanwhile, I was still a punk college kid who hadn't had a taste of real life yet. We'd meet up a few times a year and catch up over dinner in Meadville or Grove City.
Kristen moved down to FL in the fall of 2010 and married Ben, who she'd met in Beaver Falls, PA a few years earlier. Ben's training to be a pilot in the Navy, and they live near the naval base in Pensacola. The last time I'd seen Kristen was in the summer of '10 right before she moved. Since then, I'd wanted to come visit her in her new home and life, and my two month vacation from life in the South gave me the perfect chance to finally see her.
Friday night, Kristen and I went to dinner at the Fish House, one of her favorite restaurants in Pensacola. I had some world famous Grits a Ya-Ya (not 100% sure that's the name) that have been featured on all sorts of cooking shows. They were aMAZing. The next day, she showed me around where she lives and we watched some college football with her husband.
Ok. One thing I've learned about Southerners is they LIVE AND DIE for their college football. They're straight up crazy about it. They fly their team's flags on their houses and cars. They disappear from the world on Saturday afternoons to stare wide-eyed at their TV screens and yell all sorts of awful things at the television. And don't even try to talk about anything other than football on Saturdays! They won't have it.
I left their house during the LSU game, hoping the traffic would be lighter because of the game and widespread addiction to football. Success! I got to Foley, AL after an easy 40 minute drive.
In Foley, I stayed at the Peters' house. Their (biological) son, Jesse, and (unbiological) son, Jeff, are also friends of mine from camp. They'd both said I should come visit Foley sometime, and I couldn't imagine a better time to go see them than now.
The Peters' house is not your typical place. Jesse and Jeff have both called it a community house, while Robin and John (Jesse's parents) insist it's just a family home. I guess it's somewhere in between.
My first impression of their house was pretty wild. I pulled up to the curb and the first thing I saw was this perfect little fenced-in garden at the side of house. Walking in, I met the Peters family and noticed the "family" Thanksgiving dinner I'd been told about was set up to seat maybe 30 people, give or take a few. That night alone, I met a couple dozen people and watched a little community/family celebrate their second Thanksgiving this year. By the next day, I felt completely at home there (which is saying something, since the South and I have had a rocky relationship so far).
Over the next week, I got to be a part of life in the Peters household and go all around Southern Alabama. I'd never been to Bama before, and it was so good to be somewhere new. Southern AL has a certain charm to it, in a different way than Charleston does. It's not as redneck as snobby Northerners would expect, and it's not as commercialized as the FL gulf coast (thank goodness). It's beautiful in its relaxed, coastal, small town, big-hearted, raw, uncomplicated, comfortable, hospitable way. Not to say it doesn't have its fair share of struggles like anywhere else - there's plenty of poverty and other issues beneath the surface - but there were a lot of unexpected good things there as well.
The greatest thing about the trip was the people I met and spent time with. The Peters family is pretty wonderful, and their house is a meeting place for so many different folks from their community (or people connected to someone there). The house varies from boisterous chaos to unexpected tranquility, and there can be great advantages to both those circumstances and everything else in between. Personally, I've had enough time to myself over the first month of my stay down South to last me a while, so I loved the ever-shifting, lively crew of people passing through the doors of the Peters' home.
And now I'm back in Summerville. I'm writing this in an overstuffed easy chair with my dog curled up next to me and enough peace and quiet I could easily share it with a few people. It'd be nice if it worked that way - send tranquility to the half-crazed people running themselves ragged in their hopped-up lives, and send some crazy to those who have accidentally overdosed on silence and solitude.
As much as I crave balance in my life, that's just not how it is at the moment. Two months of too much peace and quiet down here (split in half by one much-welcomed week of crazy in AL!), and then I head to Chicago. Life is going to be all sorts of madness there for a while as I settle into my brand-new city and school. Til then, I guess I'll just continue to store up some energy and get ready for the whirlwind on the horizon.
