The Early Georgia Period
1993-2008
I never felt southern.
I said you guys instead of y’all. I did not like grits or collards. I did not have cousins nearby or family reunions to speak of. We were a family of Alaskan identity transplanted to Georgia.
But identity mattered not to a girl whose only aim was to explore. The south was home to lighting bugs and garden snakes and ladybugs and snapping turtles. All of which I tried to domesticate. Our home would have been crawling with color if only my mother hadn’t been so resistant. I could not decipher a material difference between Juliet Rose (the snapping turtle I rescued from death by car) and Speedy Gonzales (my brother’s pet mouse). The mouse bit me once. Juliet had committed no such acts of aggression and yet she was the one banished from our house. Life was so unfair.
I had a particular fondness for the big, yellow spiders that lived beneath our trailer. There was a little opening under the porch where the underworld was exposed. All I saw were webs and brightly colored, marble-sized, eight-legged beings that were terribly misunderstood. I would sit under the porch and tell the spiders stories; convinced they just needed friendship.
I had never met a creature who was not my friend. I thought everything and everyone would love me and love to be loved by me, and so they were. My early childhood was blissfully ignorant of rejection or insecurity.
But, as we all know, adolescence is life’s response to such an existence. Adolescence plus losing my father plus transitioning from home to public school plus the awareness of poverty equated to a very insecure state of being. When I think of my time at Central High School, I mainly recall feeling strange, unsouthern, and misunderstood. My childhood philosophy of love and be loved had long since been shattered by insecurity, both my own and others’.
Despite never feeling a sense of belonging, Macon always held a charm for me. I spent most of my afternoons and weekends at Joshua’s Cup reading or writing or chatting with other regulars. Something about the downtown and the quirky characters that belonged there gave me hope that perhaps I wasn’t as out of place as I believed.
It wasn’t until I left Macon that I began to realize how much I really loved it.