Alabama Tracks

In the movie “My Fair Lady” we are told the story of Elsa, the cockney flower girl transformed by the arrogant Henry Higgins into a proper lady. There’s a scene towards the end of the movie where she goes back to that alleyway she used to peddle flowers in. Only now she’s dressed like a proper lady and, more importantly, she speaks like one. The people she used to know don’t recognize her. By the end of the scene there is one crystal clear truth:

It isn’t home anymore.

There’s a difference between making your own home and saying goodbye to the old one. Erin cried a great deal over the pending loss of the house she’s known for years and she asked me “Why do I feel this way? I did this 2 years ago.” She left her parents anc cleaved to me, just as God ordained, but there’s something else about “home”. Something that runs deeper and isn’t so easily washed away by the passage of miles or time.

In our hearts there’s this concept of what used to be. I call it “The good ‘ol days” because there is often little negative that we remember about it. It’s like a painting or one of those three dimensional panoramas. We cleave to that concept no matter how far along in life we moved. I ran headlong into it 2 years ago on our honeymoon. We used to live in Littlerock, CA. It was the first house we had ever owned. We poured our lives into that place. We landscaped the back yard. We had 2 cats. Life was idyllic… at least in my mind’s eye. Then we moved to The South which is basically a foreign country. I never left that house, though. And here we were, 9 years later driving past it. The trees were larger but the house was unkept. The grass I had mowed so many times had dead spots. The back yard, once a luscious area to play or just enjoy the cool desert air was overrun with weeds and the trees needed serious trimming.

Depression doesn’t cover something like that. Reality came crashing into my panorama and all it took was one poorly timed remark from Erin to just nail the coffin shut. It was one of the most depressing days of my life. The high school I loved had moved. The places we used to go were now the middle of the city.

The stark reality was I couldn’t go home. It didn’t exist anymore. That wasn’t a bad thing. Some part of me still wanted to try and move back there someday but now you couldn’t get wild horses to drag me back. California is no longer a place I want to live. Home is elsewhere.

Today Ken and Chris closed on land and soon the panorama will crash in on 3031 Ridgepine Dr. That’s not a bad thing. It’s hard, but it forces you to throw the panorama out and look at where you are now. It’s God’s way of telling us all we need a new panorama. The old ones just don’t cut it anymore.

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