Country Girl

I’m a southern gal, through and through. I grew up in rural Lakeland, Florida, in a trailer park. I was friends with a group of kids I daily raised hell with, and I did it mostly barefoot, while haphazardly avoiding pricker bushes and fire ant mounds. We went fishing, snake hunting, lizard and chicken chasing, and stole distilled moonshine from our youngest friend’s daddy’s shed in their backyard and took turns drinking from it. It went down hot, we nearly threw up, but out of our heads we took a much-needed nap in a large tree just outside the trailer park, so nobody would know. There were about fourteen of us. We were all poor. We all looked out for each other; we all had each other’s backs, and we all loved each other immensely as any kid would do in those situations. I miss those days.  Sometimes I look back, however, and realize how incredibly stupid we were though too. Like swimming in the river behind our trailers with the gators sunbathing on the opposite bank, while some of us kept watching on the other side. Or going snake hunting with nothing but sticks, pinning them down, laughing about it, then killing the venomous thing so we could skin it, cook it up, and have something to eat for lunch that day. Or raiding duck nests, eating the eggs raw, then commenting about how the luckiest person in the bunch got the crunchy one. 

I have an old VHS player sitting on my desk, and I regularly watch my old VHS tapes of me during my childhood days. I listen to me talk in my country accent, laughing it up with my friends, watching me hug them with my dirty clothes and skinned up knees, before running off across the lawn to do a cartwheel or two as we headed down toward the river for another day of weird adventures. I never noticed how blue the sky was then, or how green the grass was. How beautiful everything seemed. Was it just the times? Or did everything suddenly turn grey as we got older?

I’ve recently thought about packing everything up, possibly, within the next two years and moving away from Nebraska. Life here seems too dull. Life here seems grey and cold. I miss the south, immensely. I miss the heated summers, and I miss lulling myself to sleep listening to the chirps and swoons of alligator babies calling to their mama’s in the middle of the night. I miss the taste of actual sweet tea! I miss the polite ways people treated each other. I miss feeling at home.

My husband is wanting to give it go. He’s originally from northern Sweden, so I’m not sure how he’ll handle the heat. My kids were born and raised in Nebraska, so it’ll be a big change for them. I’m wanting my brother to move with us, but he has stakes planted here now, and I’m not sure he’ll budge, and losing him to distance is going to be rough on my heart and soul, so I’m not sure how I’ll fair all and all, but it’s a change I feel I desperately want to make. I feel it calling me like nothing else, and I want to go home. 

Wish me luck, I guess. Life is like a roller coaster, we just hang on for the up’s and down’s; the twists and turns and pray to whatever is in charge up there that we don’t get thrown off.