Just a Little Homesick

I don't have much for today, other than missing the Carolinas. I'm leaning up against the radiator, the warmest I've felt in months, remembering days of insufferable heat and feeling a weird nostalgia for them, listening to the Avett Brothers and leaning into the sound for the first time in months, missing my car and the freedom it gave me, blaring music down deserted mountain roads and coastal highways. If I press up against the radiator close enough, I'll be back on Jockey's Ridge, getting sunburnt flying kites, or on Harbor Island walking across the low tide landscape, or in Charleston listening to In The Curve for the first time, or on the practice field in Chapel Hill in August, or walking to Franklin Street for lunch on an unbearable summer afternoon, or sitting behind the blocks, waiting for my event at the swim team conference meet, eight and tiny and unsure of how to feel about the big wide world in front of me.

It's funny, 'cause I know that I have memories of cold moments, shivering in the tiny church in Hillsborough before the handbell concert or sledding on cardboard sleds or in the parking lot at South Caldwell when my first inherited car died in the parking lot in the snow or in my car on the way to Orange High School when I was student teaching and the heating wouldn't turn on until the coolant temperature was 171 at least. But here, right now, all I want is to be warm and to think of the summers I've had, fireflies dancing a couple of feet above the grass and cicadas singing their songs.