Draw a line on a map from Fairhope, Alabama, the small southern town where I live now to Kuwait, the place where I lived for the last 17 years, and it will stretch 7,229 miles as the crow flies. If the crow flew in a wide, sweeping arc halfway across the earth, that is. There are no crows in Kuwait, at least none I ever saw, and the ones here are too damn busy circling roadkill to bother with transnational flight. I mention crows only because they have the reputation for divination, Apollo’s foresight, for knowing what’s coming and presumably of knowing where not to go. I, unfortunately, lack all such prescience.
*
Sky-drenching storms have battered Fairhope all weekend. My daughters and I are pet-sitting my brother’s dogs while his family vacations and we watch the rain with growing disquiet. The rain brings more than rolling thunder. Sharp wind. Lightning strikes. Dogs that won’t go outside.
My brother has two rescues—a boxer mix and a frito. I prefer the boxer. Sad brown eyes. Brindle colored. Molly could break a man’s arm with one bite. But instead she crawls onto my lap and growls soft and low, like a cat purring, while I rub behind her ears. I call her Mollycakes and sneak her treats when no one is looking. When we dog sit, we usually chain her to a leash staked near the kitchen door and leave her free to roam the fenced-in backyard. She likes to dig holes near the fenceline. Chomp lizards squirreling across the patio. Today, however, thanks to the rain, Molly refuses to go outside.
At dinner time, my mom shows up with homemade coffee cake and grocery store wine. We discuss the problem of the dogs.
“They are like princesses, these two. So delicate.”
“I don’t blame them. The rain is wet and cold. The grass slick, slimy. Ugh.”
“It’s just water.”
“Tell them that.”
Later, we’re watching Into the Woods, which we have seen before but still enjoy for the music and the fairytales, when the rain finally stops. Sabel, my youngest, grabs a box of treats from the kitchen counter and heads out, calling to the dogs and waving the box around. Both hesitate at the edge of the patio.
Wet grass. Standing water. The air smells of rain and more to come. They don’t like it.
But Sabel shakes the box again and, finally, they bound across the grass, jumping and circling, and do their business. On the back patio, we all high-five, cheering and whooping as if our football team just won the playoffs. Then we single file back inside. Except Mom, who pauses at the threshold, and hollers out to Sabel: “Watch out for snakes.”
“What? What are you talking about?” I ask. Where’d that come from?
Thankfully Sabel hasn’t heard or else she’d never set foot on grass again.
“What snakes?”
“Copperheads are out now. All the rain. They’re on the move.”
On the move? What does that even mean? On the move. Like the migration of the wildebeest across the African savannah? A mega herd of copperheads storming down main street? A snake stampede in Fairhope, Alabama?
*
When I first moved back to the Gulf Coast, I thrilled at all the random animal sightings. Two weeks in our new apartment and a barred owl flew just above my head one morning while out walking. A flock of cardinals (are birds always flocks? Can’t they ever be coveys or flitters or hopes?) lives in the pear trees and azalea bushes outside our door. I often see them hopping from tree to ground, snatching worms from the Bermuda grass.
These sightings mark a stark contrast to what I’d grown used to while living in Kuwait. Years ago, I moved abroad for work, fell in love, married and had a family. I’d forgotten trees and frogs and squirrels. In the desert, we find camels grazing the arfaj scrub and palm-sized geckos skittering across the sand. But the wildest animal one might encounter in Kuwait—save the occasional escaped pet lion—are the feral cats that live near trash dumpsters at the ends of city blocks.
Since returning to coastal Alabama, I’ve glimpsed opossums scurrying across the road. We’ve spotted butterflies and beetles along the bluff, found spiders galore in our closets, and enough birds to start an aviary. At Fairhope pier, I spotted a Great Blue Heron, gliding low over the murky water, trolling for lunch. Finally I understand what Barry Lopez meant when he wrote “It’s relatively easy to say why animals might seem magical. Spiders and birds are bound differently than we are by gravity. Many wild creatures travel unerringly through the dark. And animals regularly respond to what we, even at our most attentive, cannot discern.” Each sighting feels like a fairytale, as if I’m Snow White in the forest singing to the deer and squirrels, a connection with the natural lushness of the south, a place I once called home.
*
Runover armadillos flattened on the roadsides are common here. Their stumpy legs left sticking straight up, as if in prayer or perhaps middle finger signaling. A final fuck you to the taillights of the car that hit them.
Armadillos are orthodox in the South, like iced tea or y’all or grits for breakfast. They are, in other words, both innocuous and ubiquitous, about as friendly as a “Well, bless her heart” and similarly menacing.
They remind me of the 80s movie, Steel Magnolias. If you haven’t seen it, don’t let the stereotyping stop you. Julia Roberts plays a beautiful, southern princess, Shelby, who also happens to be dying. She will risk her life to have a child because motherhood and family are everything.
Life is unfair. Shelby must die. But thankfully she, and her long-suffering mother (Sally Field with helmet hair), are blessed by a group of good, southern women. All are clichés: the gossipy hairdresser, the rich widow, the loose, then later religious, divorcée. After Shelby dies, her mom will be comforted by this circle of intimates, and that is what makes the loss – and ultimately life – bearable.
The entire movie is a cliché. I don’t mind though because I love the southern accents, more Louisiana bayou than coastal Alabama but still representative of the sounds of my youth. At the heart of the movie is a distinctly southern fairytale: a close-knit community of family and friends as portrayed by the endless gatherings—Christmas, festivals and Easter egg hunts—and finally, the piece de resistance in the guise of the town’s requisite cantankerous old bat, Ouiser (played to perfection by Shirley McClain).
In moving home, or what I once thought of as home, I’d hoped to recapture some of that magic, a close-knit community for myself and my daughters. I missed the camaraderie and connection of my massive, raucous family. I wanted my children, both born abroad, to feel a part of a larger whole, to know family they had only ever visited for summer holidays. I hoped for something I’d thought we’d find here: love unconditional, strong family bonds and the casual ease of spending time with people who know you intimately. I imagined our tribe—my mom, five sisters, two brothers, and all our attendant significant others and offspring—gathering for banal, I mean enchanted, family Christmases, barbequing on the Fourth of July, and playing cards at the beach. Nothing but laughter and suntan lotion, good times and grilled steak.
Things aren’t quite working out as I hoped.
We live only a minutes from each other, but our gatherings are stiff and formal. Everyone eats, is über polite, and then returns to their separate homes and separate lives. Instead of esprit des corps, we are strangers in all but name.
Worse, my return seems to have triggered drama and tension. We quarreled at Christmas over petty disagreements (who is not speaking to who at Christmas dinner) and we argued all through Mardi Gras. My mom and I stood in the front yard shouting at each other after I refused to allow my girls to go with her to the Mystic Magnolias parade. The Mother’s Day dinner of fried chicken and biscuits, orchestrated by my older brother, ended with us taking the stiffest family portrait since American Gothic.
I’ve always thought of distance as a line on a map, hours spent in the car or on a plane. But I feel more estranged from my family now than the years I lived in Kuwait. I thought that the ties that bound us were strong and permanent. I understand now that this feeling isn’t exactly reciprocated.
It’s a nuance I’m sensitive to at every gathering. I want to talk about the issues separating us. But we no longer talk to each other about anything meaningful. Or at least none of them talk to me. I cannot seem to breach the wall of politesse.
Perhaps I’ve been away too long—decades of distance complicated by divergent values and differing political views —and past hurts long left simmering. The intimacy of our shared childhood has been eroded by time and changing life circumstances.
Love remains and concern and loyalty. But I don’t know how to close the gap, how to rebuild the lines of communication.
*
Armadillos had never scared me before. Such gawky, clumsy creatures. More ridiculous than threatening. Trundling along a highway or squashed flat on the verge. Apparently, they jump or leap forward when frightened, smacking right into oncoming traffic. Armadillo suicide. I’ve hardly given thought to them until my recent return home. At the moment, however, I can’t stop thinking about them.
Now I see snakes everywhere too.
In every squiggly twig on the sidewalk, in every flash of movement in the overgrown grass. Copperheads are masters of camouflage. Their hourglass markings and brown-reddish-beige bodies perfectly matched to the rich mushroom colors of the earth. They disappear undernearth log piles and fallen leaves and unsuspecting feet.
The thought of swarms of snakes migrating – across backyards and roadside ditches, the pond on the corner lot, our living room – would have never occurred to me. Until I heard they were on the move. Instead of familial love and sibling closeness, I’ve got copperheads and armadillos, rain-soaked dogs and an owl that was quite possibly trying to kill me.
Last night, getting up for a cup of water around 2 am, I jumped and screamed when I saw a copperhead slithering under the stove in the kitchen. Of course, it may have been an errant dishcloth knocked from the counter in the dark. But who can tell?
*
In Steel Magnolia’s wedding reception scene, crazy Ouiser stands at a side table, handing out pieces of the groom’s cake to guests. The groom’s cake is what grabs my attention. It is everything: Blood red velvet covered in concrete gray fondant, molded to look like an armadillo. Drum, the clueless father and a thorn in Ouiser’s side, asks for a slice, and Ouiser, knife in hand, lops off the entire tail end of the sugary beast. To this, Drum quips, “nothing like a good piece of ass,” as he walks away. I always chuckle, despite the misogyny, because in my mind the armadillo is every southern family. Impossible. Awkward. Rancorous. Ungainly and yet, somehow irresistible.
I think that is why I keep coming ‘home’ or at least continue to think of my mom and siblings as home despite the discomfiture of our gatherings. The distance between Drum and Ouiser is one I understand. It is the distance between rancor and caring, between my brother and me quibbling over disparate memories of our late father, obliquely avoiding our differing views on gun regulation or MAGA racism.
I came home hoping for fairytale camraderie. My effort has proven futile. The myth I imagined collapsed by the reality of years of emotional distance, festering affronts and political disagreement.
Still we are there for each other in times of need: during transnational relocations and global pandemics, family crises, births and deaths and 2 am snake sightings.
And still we keep coming together: My nephew’s graduation, a random Saturday night dinner of grilled oysters and hibachi steaks, a sick child’s ER visit, an unexpected divorce or overnight flooding. We continue to share cookouts and key lime pie and continue to help each other when in need. Maybe that is all family ever can be. Maybe home is not a magical neverland, not a snowy Hallmark movie. But a group of people, threaded together by blood, sweat and tearful recriminations. A fractured fairytale of love and heartache, arguments and long stretches of polite silence, holiday gatherings and the occasional roving band of snakes.
