"Excuse me, sir. I'm a local attorney, and this is the house I was born in and I haven't been here in twenty years, at least. We moved away when I was six.
"May I look around? Walk out on the dock?
"My father built it, around when I was born."
"What's your name?
"Yeah, that's etched in concrete in the garage.
"Go ahead.
"I know how memories go."
The house is different. Better. Renovated. When I was a child it was dark; trees bound it
and kept it in near perpetual shade. Now they're cleared away and it's lighter and not some '70s nightmare.
That's the spot on the driveway where I dropped the glass bottles, when I was three, and they exploded and I jumped up and down, barefooted, in the shards, and screamed, "Shit! Shit! Shit!" and was forgiven for cussing because I was bleeding and crying.
Between those two trees, there used to be a platform my pop built for me for a zip line he set up across the yard. He dug a pit beneath it and filled it with leaves, in case I slipped and fell.
And I protested and railed against the pit, as a four year old, because I'd never fall, and promptly was saved by those leaves on my very first attempt to get on.
The grass on that spot on the lawn is grown back, but, literally, for years, it was bare, scorched dead, from where my cousin Mari set down a sparkler on top of a bag of fireworks on some 4th of July. And I remember being tossed over someone's shoulder as everyone sprinted away in all directions from the blast and I watched it erupt into an explosion of a million white hot sparks, like the Death Star met its end on our lawn.
There's the tree next to the dock I used to climb, and there's the pluff mud where, when it was low tide, because I was so small, I could carefully walk out onto it for a ways without sinking in too much, but, if I did, I got the hose before I was allowed back in the house. I didn't know anything could be that cold.
The dock! The dock! The dock! There's where I stood and Pop helped me fire a gun for the first time. He helped me hold and aim and squeeze and I shot the pluff mud and the M1 Garand nearly broke my shoulder and I cried and "I'm going to count to three and then I'll give you something to cry about! One, Two, Three!"
And look at that! Raccoon droppings on the dock. Pop hated raccoons scat on his dock.
He even rigged a trip wire to a car battery to fry the little bastards, until my mom found out and made him take it down because she envisioned a pile of dead neighborhood kids, who'd attempt to sneak onto the dock at night. So Pop left triscuit crackers coated in tabasco out there, thinking aversion therapy would keep them off the dock, but all that really happened was we couldn't sleep because raccoons screamed in the trees all night as they shat fire.
The boards are spongy, as though they can't handle an adult me. I fell off the dock plenty of times.
There was that one time at a party, when I was a baby, seated on the edge, next to the creek. "James, don't let him sit so close, he'll fall in."
"He's fine."
I wasn't. They turned their heads for an instant and in I went. Pop ripped off his watch and tore out his wallet and launched in and brought me up. And when I learned to swim years later, the family friend who taught me, who held me as I worked on my form, would always tell folks how I trembled and trembled in her hands.
And I walk back to get in my car and leave and that was then and this is now and I have marsh and pluff mud and saltwater and lowcountry in my veins and bones and I'll find my home again.
I will.
