Homecoming

Autumn in Virginia brings red and gold leaves, apple butter, and college homecomings.  I look forward to two of these.  Brilliant, vibrant colors smoothed across the Blue Ridge like a rippling quilt make my soul sing.  Apples cooked down with cinnamon scenting the air like fresh baked apple pie, and in the end you have a jar of deliciousness – what’s there not to like?  No, it’s that big “h” that leaves me trembling a-washed with anxiety.

I’m not philosophically opposed to Homecoming; returning to my “roots,” to the nest from which I learned to fly strums my heartstrings of nostalgia.  I love the honeyed notion of reconnecting with friends (and, let’s face it, fiends) I knew long ago.  I’ve changed – my goodness, how I’ve changed.   I’m sure they’ve changed.   Fear of reconnection is not the problem.  So, what’s the deal?

I loved college.  I loved the town, Charlottesville; I loved the Corner (the hangout spot); I loved the Lawn; I loved being who I was then; I loved a boy, B.  I married that boy, and that marriage ended – badly.  Very badly.  But Charlottesville was where we had been happy.

For years after the marriage dissolved, I would bypass Charlottesville on the interstate, or, if I could not avoid the town – a bit difficult as my sister chose to live there for a time, I steadfastly refused to go anywhere close to the University.  I was afraid that stepping foot on the hallowed Grounds (not “Campus” mind you) – the place where  I had known such joy – would cloud those memories, until all that remained was contaminated.  I clung so tightly to those memories,  as if by clenching my fists and refusing to let go, somehow I could hold onto the good parts of him as well, refusing to acknowledge that he – that we – belonged to those years past.  Not a healthy outlook, ya think?

I tried it once – to go back.  I attended football game with a friend and her family.  And I spent the entire three hours feeling like instead of the well-fed, well-muscled players chasing each other up and down the turf battling over the little odd-shaped ball, they were trampling their spikes over my soul.   After that, I decided I was finished – no more Charlottesville, no more University, and definitely no more college football.  But the impact of that experience on my emotional stability left me reeling.

But here’s the thing: how could a place have that much power over me?  How could a town blast open a hole through my carefully fabricated walls and destroy my rebuilt life?

Hmmmh. . . Perhaps the problem lay not in what I was choosing to avoid or how well I was accomplishing that.  Perhaps the problem was more fundamental: my life’s foundation.

I had looked to another human being to be the cornerstone of my world, my very existence.  Wow!  I had handed this boy so very much power.  I had handed my life over to someone who could choose to treasure it or trash it; guess which he did? Not particularly smart of me.  Because other people can and do leave!  They leave all the time for all sorts of reasons – relationships fracture, break, shatter.   But, and I have to take responsibility for this, the kind of power to make or break someone’s world, well, that sort of power must entail a ton of pressure – that can’t be fun.  As humans, I don’t think we really are capable of being individually responsible for owning someone else’s happiness, but what’s more, we’re not supposed to be.

My greatest folly then had been building my house on sand because I did not know how to do differently. Now I’m older, soooo much older in mind and heart as the years have not been particularly kind, but I’d hazard a guess that I needed them not to be.  Because had the years come soft and gentle then I’m almost sure that I’d have continued meandering in my cotton-candy pink self-involved delusions.  Instead, more than once I’ve been knocked to my knees – hard – on long, deserted stretches of gravel studded roads until I looked up to meet the God who had been standing there the entire time waiting for me to notice Him.

Now those years after B have added up, and time is a strangely funny thing.  The events that devastated don’t seem to hold such consequence.  And those wounds, well, they’ve healed, and they – the ubiquitous “they” – say that scar tissue is just that much stronger where cuts landed years before.  Maybe it’s just simply that other things, more recent things, have dulled a decade old ache, or maybe, truly, I’ve come far enough to forgive.   I’d like to think it’s that last one.  Anyway, I’m going back to Charlottesville, back to the Lawn, back to my memories – the ones without B.  It’s my gift to him and to myself after all this time.