charleston

when i was about 4 and a half years old, my dad's sales job offered him a promotion if he left alabama and moved to charleston, south carolina. my brother and i were too young to really care where we lived, so it was fine with us. my dad has lived all over the southeast, so he wasn't opposed to a change of scenery, especially if it meant making more money. my mom, on the other hand, was not interested. she was 37 years old and had never lived anywhere besides birmingham, alabama. to her, birmingham had everything that was comfortable and desireable for her and her family, so why leave? where my dad saw a great opportunity, my mom saw an unnecessary, devastating change in our lives. but, my dad, the perpetual salesman, convinced my mom that we should go. he told her it would only be for a few years and charleston is a great town and it's really not that far from alabama at all. so, she agreed. the company my dad worked for sent over a shoddy moving company to pack up our stuff, load it up, and drive it to south carolina. my mom cried the entire time and fretted over every dish and every knick-nack that the movers wrapped in paper and packed into boxes. she did not want to leave.

it's really easy to see now that this was the beginning of the end for my parents' marriage. i think my mom wasn't willing to give another place a try. birmingham was all she'd ever known and it was comfortable for her. there was no risk involved in staying there. it would be easy. predictable. familiar. so she decided before we even left alabama that she wasn't going to like charleston. so she didn't. at the same time, my dad wasn't really prepared to take no for an answer. he knew that charleston would be great, that he would love his job, and that my brother and i would be fine wherever we went. i think, in his mind, my mom would see how nice it was there and that she'd learn to like it. even if he was right that the rest of us would be fine and that my mom would be fine too if she would give charleston a chance, he ignored the fact that she was so devastated to leave. he paid no attention to her tears and didn't really try to understand why it was such a hard transition for her to accept. it could've all turned out so differently if they were both willing to see the situation for what it was, but i suppose that neither of them was strong enough to do that.

to me, birmingham only consisted of our house and our street. my life was nothing but chasing fireflies in our front yard and running through the sprinklers in the summer and going swimming in our backyard pool and playing on the tire swing at preschool with my "boyfriend," tyler payne. the highlight of my week was walking with my brother and my dad to the little convenience store down the street, getting a mickey mouse-shaped popsicle, and eating it while sitting on this huge, gray rock (we called it Big Rock) that was in the yard of the fire station on the corner of our street.

even though i was just a little kid, i loved everything about charleston. when we moved into our new house, i was so excited about my new bedroom. my mother had insisted that my room be painted the exact same shade of pink that my bedroom in birmingham had been, with the exact same white wallpaper border with drawings of little girls in bonnets pushing dolls in baby carriages. the best thing about my room, though, was the closet. it was huge. it was really more like two closets put together with two huge doors. the day that we moved in, i piled up all the pillows from my bed and all of my stuffed animals into the floor of the closet(s), crawled on top of the soft, cottony mound, and shut the closet door. i remember being so comfortable and content and excited about this new place that was still filled with all of my familiar things.

charleston is an adorably quaint town. the streets are lined with enormous hundred-year-old trees with whispy gray spanish moss hanging from the limbs. there were tons of tall, pastel-colored houses with white trim and front porches with rocking chairs on them. everyone in charleston was obsessed with the civil war. there were daily civil war reinactments. there were huge plantations everywhere with big collumns and enormous yards with the greenest grass i have ever seen. there was a huge outdoor market downtown that i loved to go to. there was always a group of big, round black women weaving straw baskets and sweating in the swealtering south carolina humidity. i remember one table at the market with a tall old man with a white beard and straw hat standing behind it. the table had a green plaid tablecloth on it and a little round basket filled with genuine civil war bullets. there was another little basket next to it filled with indian arrowheads.

our house was built on land that had, at one point, been underwater. when it rained, our backyard would flood and my brother and i would walk outside and squish our fingers through the puddles. if we were really lucky and if we searched hard enough, we would find tiny little sharks' teeth burried in the mud.