I slipped my hands into my jacket pockets and stepped out into the cool, not-quite-wintry February afternoon. It was a pleasant Thursday on the University of Memphis Lambuth campus, and I was in need of a good walk among the trees before I began my afternoon Spanish class. Ever since I can remember, nature has always been an escape for me.
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If you had asked me about my future in the fall of 1994, I would have told you that I was planning on moving back home to Paducah, Kentucky, as soon as I finished college. I was supposed to live on Jefferson Street, right next door to my life-long BFF, Laura. She was going to live in her grandmother’s house, and I would buy the house next door. Twenty-four years later, she still reminds me of that broken promise. I had roots there in Paducah. They were strong and firmly planted. My daddy grew up there, too
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I watched a film a few months ago that has more or less floated along the periphery of my thoughts ever since. It was titled A Ghost Story and was about the passage of time and the way humans seem to find a way to tear down and rebuild everything over and over again. More than that, however, it’s about one man’s attachment to a physical place. Throughout different scenes in the movie, a young couple is seen discussing the possibility of moving from the house where they live. The house is inauspicious.
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In the 1940s my grandmother’s boss proposed to her, which she promptly refused. It must have made her daily life incredibly awkward, particularly since she didn’t have a car and her boss frequently picked her up to take her to work. She lived near the neighborhood now known as LANA in midtown. It’s a part of Jackson that many remember as Hicksville. The proposal most likely happened only a few yards from where I get my prescriptions filled.
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When I tell people that my family moved from Seattle—and that we didn’t move to Jackson because of family or a job—I often get the response, “Why would you move here?” Really it all started with woods. As Henry David Thoreau wrote in Walden, about his own time living in the woods, “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”
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