East Again

It’s a funny thing, how fast everything moves in this world, and how that existential speed can disorient us. A week and a half ago, we got into a box of metal and steel, and we sat in it all day and part of the night, and when we got out of the box, we were in another country. We were in Texas, and how did that happen?

It’s also a funny thing how different people can be in different regions of the same country. When we go home to Texas to visit, we’re always struck with how different the people are from the people we live around now. We’re used to sullen, uncommunicative, clannish folks who trust no one who wasn’t born in their neck of the woods, people who wear pajamas and house-slippers to Walmart, who drink Mountain Dew and get drunk at NASCAR events, never once having sat inside a race car. We go back to Texas and encounter tough, masculine men who are courtly to the women who are neatly dressed and feminine and capable.  Many of these folks, men and women, were riding horses before they rode bicycles. And they drink Dr. Pepper.

So we had our culinary blur of kolaches and Whattaburger and Tex-Mex and barbecue and chicken fried steak (and steak fingers), and we gained the weight and swore to do better after the vacation was over, and we strolled through public places and listened to the music of the accents and the poetry of the Texas slang expressions, and we watched the grandsons as they walked a little closer to the clouds than they did the last time we saw them, and we talked and laughed and played with their dogs and discussed the most important three things a man should always have in his pocket. We discussed home renovations and job drama and 75 mph speed limits and conceal carry permits and Comanches and heat indices and dance halls and Waylon Jennings and Marty Robbins.

And then we woke up one morning and a week had gotten behind us, and we got back in the box and sat in it all day and a good chunk of the night, and we arrived back here at our little farm, and the temperature was a lot colder than what we’d left back in Tejas, and as is our custom, we had the car unloaded and the bags unpacked and everything put away within a half hour. We got some sleep and then we got up and drove down to the kennels where the dogs were boarded and we had a happy reunion with a skinnier Jinx and Bluebelle, who had eaten sparingly during their incarceration. The ever-resilient Dixee apparently decided not to participate in the fast, and she looked her usual wooly, belligerent self.

A weekend of rest and then back to work today, and it’s a funny thing how five minutes after sliding into the chair and starting up the standard stuff, it’s as if I never left town, never missed a day of work, never breathed in the sweet tang of sourwood and pine, never listened to the magpies with their kazoo voices, never unspooled a cinnamon roll or cracked open a 6666 Ranch beer. It all melted away, none of it happened, it was all in my head.

Teaching the boys how to sharpen their knives

But for something imaginary, I sure do miss it. All of it.

~ S.K. Orr