Pause

Tonight I am staying at my grandparents' house for the first time in quite a long while. Years, in fact. The last time I slept in this bed – once my aunt's – I was in high school. I graduated eight years ago, I'm surprised to realize tonight. These intervening eight years have seen me off to college, a mere three hours away, down (in every sense of the word) to Key West, across the ocean several times to Europe and God knows where else. As I brushed my teeth tonight, looking into the mirror in the bathroom that has smelled and looked the same since the beginning of my relatively young memory, I was struck by how little things here have changed. The mile or so of dirt road leading to my grandparents' house is just as dusty, with just as many deer lurking on the corners and just as many (more?) paint-chipping rocks that seem to jump up off the road when you accelerate past fifteen miles per hour. As a high school student, driving with inordinate pride my freshly-washed 1998 green Civic EX, it took me about twenty minutes to drive that distance, so slowly did I drive in a vain effort to avoid accumulating any red Georgia dust on the rims. The dogs, Lily and Tamar, are the same. They still beg shamelessly for any and all food, they still whine like the spoiled, pampered little things they are when my grandmother pretends to insist that they “go night-night” and shuts the door to the washroom. And my grandmother, for her part, still tells fragmented stories – heavily interspersed with sidenotes – about her childhood, my grandfather, their courtship, our family, the dogs and anything else that has managed to make a blip on her radar. Someone who doesn't know her would have a hard time following, but I get it. So does everyone else that shares my surname.

Despite all this underwhelming sameness, the one thing that has clearly, starkly changed is of course me. I've grown past my childish need for attention and recognition for my maverick-ness and iconoclast status, and I'm content to be who I am and let my grandparents do the same. We don't need to argue about politics, religion, science or anything related to my parents' divorce. Many things in the past year or so have disappeared from the list of things that I consider of vital importance, and I'm happy to say that it's made life easier and far more enjoyable. I learned in Ukraine how to let petty inconveniences slide, and in Turkey M showed me how to be happy because of them, rather than in spite of. Tonight I listened to my grandma recount her one year of independent living in Savannah, working at the telephone company for a dollar an hour and bravely walking home in the pitch darkness at the dangerously late hour of nine PM. She told me about the letters her father sent her mother when he was forced to find work in Atlanta, a distant Gomorrah some two hundred miles to the northwest of little Collins, Georgia, and the five dollars he included in one letter, admonishing my great-grandmother to “make sure you give twenty-five cents to the church”. Then she listened to me talk about my upcoming internship in Peru, a copy writing gig that I desperately wanted and got.

I had a good time tonight, and you know something? I really didn't want to come at all.

There is not very much about my formative years that I remember (or remember clearly), and what I do recall in general I would just as soon forget. I was not abused or neglected; on the contrary, I was loved fiercely by four of the five people I now consider my family (the outlier being my brother, who didn't come around to realizing my wonderfulness until a few years ago) and cherished perhaps a bit too much. But there was tension in my home so thick and oppressive you could nearly see it, tiredness and sorrow in my mother's eyes and a general sense of unease. When I think of home in those years, I mostly remember feeling inexplicably as if I were in the way. Physically. You know when someone is carrying something heavy and coming your way, and you momentarily have that Quick-which-way-do-I-go feeling? That's the feeling I most associate with growing up.

All that being said, there are happy things I do remember: fishing with my grandpa in the pond behind my aunt's house; watching the Braves in the mid-90s at my grandparents'; Saturday mornings at the house I grew up in, playing a game my brother and I called SpyTech (played by running in a crouched position around the house and peeking into various windows to see where our parents were); and any time at all spent with my mother. These are experiences that seem like nothing, in fact at the time they might even have seemed tiresome and boring, but in retrospect they take on a gilded quality that makes me wish with all my soul I had understood how precious they were and appreciated them more. But what, really, does that even mean? Did I appreciate my grandfather taking me fishing on a day when he could have been in the fields getting work done? Probably not. Kids don't look at things that way. Did I stop in the middle of the 1995 World Series to reflect on what an exciting time we as a family were all having together? At eleven years old? I'm afraid not.

I'm about two months shy of my twenty-sixth birthday, and this year's changes have included a very real, very potent sense of my and everyone else's mortality. When you're a teenager, and even in your early twenties, it still seems as if life will go on forever the way it always has. Yes, you'll grow on up, have a career and kids or whatever, but parents, grandparents and other longstanding presences will simply remain as they seemingly always have. Then you hit twenty-five and you realize that you won't be young forever after all, and the burdensome weight of adulthood settles heavily on your shoulders, and you attempt to internalize and deal with the cold, stark reality of time, money, work, death and taxes. There are decisions to make, dreams to chase, thoughts to think, and “all the while”, as Millay wrote, “death beating the door in”.

Which brings me, in a roundabout way, to my point, which I already mentioned: I didn't want to come tonight, but I did. I came, after all, because despite the discomfort which I associate with childhood, the dirt road and searing boredom I often experience here, this place, at least, has not changed. Here the dirt road is still dusty. Here the gardenia bushes still bloom. Here my grandparents – my good, devoted grandparents – live as they always have, far removed from the cacophony of “town” and most of the complications of this huge, lonely planet. Here I can get, if not peace, at least a temporary respite from a world that is so constantly moving, changing, churning, giving and taking without a moment's notice.

I travel because I love that change. But even the greatest adventurers need a break. Even history's most noted explorers went home occasionally. Tonight, sleeping for the first time in nearly a decade in a house which has not noticeably changed in twenty-six years, driving down a dirt road that will never be paved, having conversations I've had my whole life – I feel just a little bit safer. Time, money, work, death and taxes are distant realities that I'll deal with tomorrow. But not tonight. Tonight I just want to rest.