the habit of being

I miss my slurry accent and the heat and the grasshoppers and big as my hand. I miss the dumb boys who got their gargantuan pick-up trucks on their 16th birthday, the happiest day of their lives. I miss being called “Miss.” I miss bonfires of Tillmanstone Farm, and watching the Rocky Horror Picture Show on a sheet at Georgia Southern University on Halloween night. I miss my mother’s anatomy lab, the bones and the slides and the opened-up cats. I miss Willingway Hosptial, where my mother worked before that. I miss my own stream and my own pecan orchard and all my generations of ill-fated cats. I miss picking blackberries of the sides of my own dirt road, which didn’t have a name, and then did. I miss Lisa Luckett, with her Little Miss Bulloch County tropheys, and how she stole my Barbie clothes even though she had so many. I miss the red car my step-father drove, red with a white stipe down the side, while he and my mother were still dating. I miss handing out the chips to the grown-ups at AA meetings, even to the ones who hadn’t earned them yet. I miss arrowheads. I miss having a better library in my mother’s bedroom than anywhere else in town. I miss how the bookstores never lasted longer than six months before going out of business. I miss family stories, and all the windowsill lizards that shared the same name - Leonard - and stars. I miss runnign dow the beach at Tybee at one in the morning, and going to the Ritz Carlton in Atlanta once a year so we couple pretend we weren’t poor. I miss hating my stupid, backwards, hometown, and those red-faced fat people who sold Confederate flags at tables on the side of the road, and used “Yankee” as a derogatory term, effectively.