As my children get older, travel gets much easier. I didn’t hear “Are we THERE YET??!!??” until we were at the halfway mark, and not one person got full-on carsick. Doing 35 mph on the interstate made me a wee bit cranky, but since the lack of (new) windshield wipers was indeed my fault there was nothing to do but suck it up and deal. The drive still wipes me out, but we all know I’m a wimp like that. The boys are also more willing to put up with things like “let’s sleep on the floor since Mamaw’s beds are SO TALL!!!” (And seriously, what IS it with the tall beds??!!?? Every Grandma I know from her generation has a mattress that’s twenty feet from the floor.)
The region itself is a quite heady blend of WalMart tackiness, rural charm, and a certain toughness of mind and attitude. Every southern stereotype is represented in this visit, and I shamelessly people-watch as I cruise through the shopping center parking lot. The thought occurs that I never really paid attention to the schizophrenic nature of the town. Usually my shopping companion is the elderly (but still mobile) woman who gets her hair done once a week and wouldn’t dream of being seen outside her home without makeup and a genteel honey-sweet voice as she says “You’re taller than I am, can you reach that for me please?”. This trip, I chase a woman of undetermined age through the aisles. I don’t get the opportunity to converse much - she grabs and moves on. Her makeup is garish, her hair a brassy bottle-blonde. Earrings ascend her outer ear, the ladder-like graduation of sizes pulling your eyes away from her lipstick and seeming to point down to her fringed t-shirt. Her voice was 60-grit sandpaper, her laugh a gurgling cough/wheeze.
As you can see, I was rather fascinated by this woman in her splendor.
Mamaw says that suburban sprawl expansion will soon absorb our tiny hometown and fold it into the bland Big City. I’m not quite sure how to feel about that - although it is our family homeplace, it’s not MY home. But the one good thing?
The view will still be the same.
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