Journey Home
Falling into the Poles…
by Windy Cooler
The color and quality of the light here is, I don’t know, dense. I always feel like I am being pushed into myself, quieting, sinking, falling 
through what is me and through the floor of the Earth when I walk alone here, visiting what seem like the ruins of the civilization I was part of eons ago, like the last survivor of Pompeii, when it was I who left. This is Montgomery, Alabama.
This is where I was a teenager and where I spent my early years as a mother, the place where I worked as a projectionist in a neighborhood theater, a non-profit one screen art house, called The Capri. Alabama is where my mother’s family has lived since before the American Civil War, in a small, ever flooding town called Elba, just north of Mobile. I am hardly a survivor as I burn and push through. I used to fancy myself one, feeling the need to keep on breathing through poverty and constant shaming, breathing and birthing a creature I could be proud of. The irony though is that surviving made me ashamed. And birthing is falling too.
I am walking my old walk, my first day in town, through Granny’s neighborhood, which is one dead-end block of peeling paint and plastic playsets now, all the old people as dead as where the last house blocks the street that might have been connected, up toward the theater, where I will let myself in, get a soda, just as Mac and I used to, he in his little red wagon, and then I will walk back to my friend’s home (where I am sleeping, drinking and bathing), by way of the ditch that always has tadpoles. I am a pilgrim this morning. I call this my Southern Haj.
I think there is a cultural connection between Arabs, Persians, and American Southerners. Our playful, sentimental, tribal, burning, sinking natures. Our grandparents being cast out of the garden of industrial, mechanized Eden, we, in horror, the children of Cain, or the bastard children of Abraham. We are the children who drink from secret springs of fortune and the falling, always the falling.
Isn’t it funny, my adviser points out to me in an email exchange, that it is so in vogue to consume local food amongst the very people who have moved away from where they themselves were produced and grown? I am thinking about this. I do a lot of food shopping with Martin, my friend of going on 20 years that I have been staying with. I treasure every little berry I pick on my walks, to eat the dirt, maybe to make my passage through the Earth easier, to put it inside of me.
There is a home that you can only find in the depth of old friends, their eyes and hands, old places, emotional and physical, in the labor and commitment, or the memory, which has kept the bond whole. We tell funny stories about each other. Do you remember when? There are hands that make the falling move faster, your mass becomes greater, and in so, the falling will disappear, you are moving so fast it looks like stillness, and there are eyes in which the horror dissipates, and this is home inside the rapid and heavy descent.
I have fallen now clear through, as I write this, back to my children and Washington DC, or rather the Maryland suburb, where we live. Driving the rural roads since I left my cousin Wes’s place, having discovered a new setting on my GPS that allows me to avoid the interstate. The more things change the more they stay the same.
The drive is misty and the pushing through Tennessee is so beautiful and so worth it. The rusting church roofs set on white cinderblock squares, the mountains being swallowed by clouds and vomiting up the remains of towns. I have a Cheerwine. It makes the skin above my upper lip and my tongue a very gross, like cheap ass uncooked hotdog, shade of pink, my upper lip in a messy crescent. But I am in a car, so totally alone, and it does not matter.
I think I know now why I like to look at and touch old doll houses. They feel to me like these towns I barrel through, like the meaningful to me corpse of what used to have its own meaning.
A man at a gas station tells me to keep laughing my big raucous laugh that he overhears. Southerners are so violent.
I return to my children. I have returned to my children, with many food gifts. Ob snuggles into me. He keeps smelling me. I wrap my arms around him and I make my chest his home again, pulling him close, for the fall.
Windy Cooler is a psychology student at Goddard College, and a Contributing Author for New Clear Vision. A long-time organizer and former teenage-mother-welfare-queen, she writes about the emotional lives of activists. She has two sons and lives in suburban DC. She blogs at windycooler.com, and can be reached at WindyCooler(at)gmail.com.
