14 years and I'm kind of freaking out...

(A California/Alabama life coming to an end)

Photo by Elizabeth DeRamus

Where do I start? I want to keep track. I’ve been teaching so much, I haven’t been writing as much, and I want to take notes, especially over these next few months.

Facebook tells me that on this date fourteen years ago I was looking for an apartment in Birmingham, trying to decide between Homewood and Irondale after accepting a tenure-track job teaching Creative Writing at UAB. The only thing I understood then about Birmingham neighborhoods then was that Homewood had good public schools and Fannie Flagg was from Irondale, which was situated near train tracks not far from the Whistle Stop Cafe inspiration. But as we drove through the streets of Irondale that steamy July day, Lucy said, “I feel like I’m about to visit old relatives I’ve never met before.”

Norah, then in fifth grade, would be staying in California to finish out elementary school in the school where Norah had been attending since kindergarten and where Kiffen was teaching - Betty Placensia School near downtown Los Angeles. Lucy was about to begin her first year at Sarah Lawrence, so in a way, Lucy and I were “going off to college” together, and I told myself the goodbye wouldn’t be so hard. I told myself a lot of things in those days trying to envision a two-state life to get our older kids launched and through college and plan for Norah’s education down the road. Being a freelance writer and publishing children’s novels never paid the bills much because I was always using the advances to pay off debts and pay for my book tours, so I could sell novels and blah blah blah…

But every time, I “Skyped” home in those early days from my Homewood apartment that had lawn chairs and wingbacks, I wept on screen and a friend gently said, “Maybe don’t Skype so much until you get a little more settled.”

Flannery, our oldest, was about to start his senior year at UC Santa Barbara and was taking summer school classes because he’d taken the previous semester off to help make a movie “Pete Smalls Is Dead.” What I recall about this venture is him picking up Peter Dinklage in our white Saturn at LAX and Flannery describing Peter Dinklage’s audible fear/small cries at his erratic driving. Poor Peter Dinklage, I thought, I’ve been where you are - the white Saturn later became a prop in the movie as the “Panda Pizza Car” - Peter Dinklage’s character’s job. When the car wasn’t on set, I still had to drive it to my school author visits, and one principal asked me if this was “my other gig” after I’d done a reading and workshop with the students.

So here it is 2023, fourteen years later. Lucy, now a mother, and Norah reside in Chicago, living their adult lives, Flannery is in LA living his adult life, and Kiffen retired in June after almost 35 years teaching for LAUSD.

Back in 2009, we chose Homewood over Irondale in case Norah got homesick (for being with Mama) and wanted to join me in fifth grade. Norah didn’t get homesick and didn’t join me until sixth grade so that first year I lived alone above a woman named Janet who used to leave me notes: “I know what time you got up today and went to the airport,” and so the following year I moved into a ground-floor bungalow apartment complex, and Norah joined me for sixth grade. That year I bought a piano from Bill Hill, and Norah took lessons and bravely slaughtered the giant cockroaches that flew across the living room. I couldn’t take the bugs that we called “Cadillacs” but Norah was fearless. “I’ll kill them, Mama.”

I used to tell the Bug Man, “You have to do something! I am begging you” And he would smile with a jetpack of poison strapped on his back and say, “Lady them bugs don’t want to be in here any more than you want them in here. Now, don’t get offended, I mean I know ladies are sensitive, but ma’am, your baseboards could be cleaner.”

We adopted our beloved dog, Olive, from the Birmingham Humane Society/Peace Love and Dog Paws when Norah was in sixth grade. Lucy came to visit from Sarah Lawrence and gave Olive her name, and my mother calls Olive the “most well-traveled dog” she’s ever met.

The following year we moved again into the house in Glen Iris where I am writing this post today. We rented for years until in 2019, the landlord said she was selling it and we could buy it or move. We’d never owned a home. We’d never managed to buy in Los Angeles with housing prices and yet wasn’t Birmingham our “pretend” life until we could get back to California where we’d raised our family and my parents lived in San Diego?

But with the help from Kiffen’s sister on the down payment, we bought this home in 2019 the day Lucy got married to Trent in Chicago, and we confused a Chicago notary who brought us the closing papers to Lucy and Trent’s apartment and asked, “You guys are getting married today and you’re buying a home in Alabama?” We said, “No, our daughter is getting married, and we are buying a home in Alabama because…”

And so tomorrow we fly back to Los Angeles to begin packing up the house in Echo Park to somehow combine fourteen years and two states into one. I’ve barely told people. I practiced saying it aloud on hikes with close friends in the spring. And it makes so much sense to combine two households into one.

Then there are the logistics. None of the stuff we have in LA will fit into this little house, and we don’t need most of it. We are bringing the art and a few beloved pieces of this and this. I don’t know what to do about all my papers and drafts of old books. Recycle? But Kiffen and I will get to live together after fourteen years although COVID and online teaching did give us some reprieves these later years.

Still, how do we leave LA? Why am I not used to moving? Even though I’ve lived in 14 states and spent my childhood moving from one football town to another, I clung to every place I’ve ever lived, but LA’s been the longest. Flannery is there living in MacArthur Park, and his life has led him to unexpected places, and I always wanted to be a landing place for him somehow. My mom, a widow now in San Diego, is almost 88 and when we talk she says, “You’re leaving? I’ll never see your house again in LA. Are you ever coming back? What about Christmas?” She and my brother, Duffy, who lives with her, love making trips to LA with the dogs. My cousin, Mo, is in Santa Monica, and countless friends are in LA that go way back to when Flannery was a baby and we met in “Mommy and Me.”

But as I was listing off all the things of dread, worry, and lowgrade freakout, Kiffen said, “I want to plant some flox here and cut back the bushes and pull out that pine that is blocking the porch and plant some more azaleas. And you know what else? We get to do this together.”

Then he climbed up on the roof to clean out the gutters in Birmingham.

Anyway, I want to keep track. I want to remember. I want to start writing again.