Gone was the old mill house turned rollerskating rink my friends and I haunted all through Jr. High. Gone was the dirt road to nowhere we had,in high school, affectionately christened "The Zanoni Screw Stop". It was there, in breathless curiosity, I touched "it" for the first time. Oh yeah, I was a bad girl.
Yet as I turned off the highway, down the back roads of my youth, the rural landscape seemed for the most part intact. It was still that strange mixture of farm country,and wide brackish rivers that have supported "watermen" and their families for centuries.
I sat in the parking lot of the marina situated on the edge of the York River lost in thought. It was here I had spent every summer from age 10 to 20 in the community pool. This was the place of my first summer job, and and a few years prior, my first summer crush. The job was as pool life guard, and it was the first I truly "wanted", so I took the certification class at the nearby coastguard station. I spent 6 weeks the previous January dragging grown men ,"coasties", twice my size out of the pool in mock drowning scenarios. Not as bad as it sounds, actually. The crush was a boy, not much older than my 14 year old self, who was staying with his family at the marina. On their house boat. The thing had a piano in the living room, I kid you not. We spent a week of summer afternoons on that boat, listening to "The Best of Bread" and necking on the couch. His kisses tasted like salt water and Chapstick.
From the marina, I drove down to the beach where I played out my childhood. Time folded in on itself, and I was four years old again. Sitting on the dock on a warm summer night, wrapped in my beach towel, and munching fruit loops out of a plastic baggie. Watching enthralled, as my father and his friends caught blue crab with bits of string, bait, and a net; I believed he was magic. To my four year old eyes, my dad could do anything.
I was not prepared for the tsunami wave of nostalgia that rushed over me as I revisited my old stomping grounds. I did not expect to feel anything but ambivalence. I had run away to an out of state college, eighteen and angry at family and friends who I imagined had never understood me. I had left heartbroken over a boy I loved with blind teenage passion, but he was selfish and cruel, and left me unsure of myself. I was more than ready to leave this small hick town where I felt invisible, and blamed everyone for making me feel that way. It was easier that way, easier to look outward rather than in.
I drove for hours, from place to familiar place, and the overwhelming sense folding around me like that beach towel was of home. For the first time I felt free to enjoy the memories of growing up here, even the painful ones, without them being blurred by the bitter film of regret. This place, for whatever it's worth, helped shape the person I am today, and I am grateful.
