Lyndon Carrier
June 2022. One of the worst months of my life in so many ways. It was the month that I learned the uncle I cherished but hadn’t seen in a while had passed. The month I had to plan a trip back to the state I was born in but hadn’t stepped foot in in nearly eleven years. It was weird the way the state felt so familiar and so foreign at the same time. This is owed mostly to the fact that we did not travel to my home town but to a slightly further one. A town I had never been in and yet I knew that that was not the reason I felt so out of place.
I always loved how spaced out everything was in Irvington, Kentucky. The people were close as were some of the buildings, but really until you hit downtown, there was so much space. Ironic that there was so much when the town was too small for the middle and high school to be in it. No, they were the next town over and every morning the students of those schools would be driven to the elementary school, get off their buses and be ushered onto the three buses that would bring them to school. I remember being so worried about when it came my time to do this, as I had trouble making it to my own bus and I only had to walk out the front door at the right time. The bus ride home took a long time, because there was so much space filled with trees and farm land. I was always the kid that stared out the window and imagined my invisible friend parcouring his way through the trees and power lines to follow me. I loved the feeling of butterflies in my stomach when the driver would take the hill too quickly. I loved to watch the farm lands turn into miles of trees stretched across the rolling hills. Most of all I loved the walk from the end of my private drive that I shared with five other children and my siblings. I would take my time breathing in the air laughing as my brothers raced the neighbors to where our drive split from the rest as it was the first to do so. I occasionally ran along with them, never in a rush because at the time I didn’t know that one day that beautiful state wouldn’t be my home.
Being back in Kentucky was amazing… and amazingly sad. Familiar and foreign, home and not at the same time. I never realized how flat Louisiana was until my air conditioner started losing life along the way. We thought the car had troubles but with a quick google we learned that cars don’t like change. This car had never left the flat roads of Louisiana, maybe Texas, and now it was bouncing back and forth between high and low altitudes with every few miles. Struggling up hills and then down. We laughed at the fact that even the car was a stranger in this northern state, as we rolled the window up and down with every hill so our ears wouldn’t pop.
I remember the day we left Kentucky for good, I remember not being aware it was the last time I would see the land we lived on and the trees I lived amongst. As silly as it sounds, if I had known I would have said goodbye. The trip was both normal and unique; per the custody agreement with my parents I was to spend every other weekend at my dad’s. When he moved states away to work the agreement changed. From that moment forward we began to spend summers with my dad in his new state and then we would return home for school. That was what the trip was supposed to be, my summer with my dad in the Louisiana heat. A week before we left my maternal grandmother said that she was moving to Louisiana and my uncle followed her as my mother’s family had a habit of doing. My mother was going to stay and waved us goodbye from the door as we pulled out of the driveway in two cars packed full of my grandmother’s belongings. A month later my mother showed up at my grandmother’s with no warning and told us that we lived here now. I had no choice in the move, I didn’t get to say goodbye to my friends or even take all of my things. Suddenly I was somewhere I didn’t want to be.
I can’t pinpoint when I stopped identifying as someone from Kentucky and instead as someone from Louisiana. Maybe it was the day that I realized I’ve spent more of my life in this state than the one I was born in. Maybe it was when I began college here instead of some other state. Maybe it was when I started telling people I am from Sulphur and not Irvington. Or maybe it was that day not so long ago when I drove over the Louisiana state line on the way back from the funeral. The felling of relief that crashed over me knowing I was back in the state, the comfort that embraced me as I took in the familiar terrain. My family was either asleep or half asleep around me, it was nearly four in the morning and all I could think of was the way the grief in my heart opposed the relief in my stomach.
The first day I felt truly comfortable in Louisiana, after realizing I was now here for good, was when my neighbor and I climbed the tree in her yard after school. I climber higher than her as I was older and more confident. I had been climbing trees since I was young; the height didn’t bother me. We were talking about the lesson we had learned in class. The Mississippi river ran almost all the way down the length of the United States. She talked about her amazement that something can travel that far. It made me feel comforted, not that she knew, because I had made that journey too. Several times at that point I had followed alongside the path the river takes.
I have a habit of looking at maps, my eyes drawn to the blue lines that represent the Mighty Mississippi. I trace my finger along the path it shows and I am in awe of how far it goes. I think of all the people that rely on the river to live, I think of all the people that have followed its path. I may not have had a say in my journey down the river, but I am relieved that it happened all the same.
Lyndon Carrier is a writer with no genre. From poetry to essays, nothing is off limits. She is often inspired by her personal experiences and her love for reading, nature. Lyndon finds that the best way for her to process anything is to write about it and she encourages her friends to do the same. When she is not writing she can be found reading, scrolling X for publishing opportunities, or sitting outside. X: @sunshinethepoet
Featured photo by Melvin Corners (Pixabay)
