I didn’t know what it meant the first time I saw you, standing in the triangular median by the stoplight that I would grow to know as the signal for “almost home,” one of the last stops before I reached my temporary home of three and a half years.
I remember you seemed frantic, nose in the air, a tiny being amidst the traffic and signal lights and whooshing wind. I was frantic at the time, too, though I had the benefit of a numbing agent and the general, arrogant ease inherent of an apex predator. But we were both without a home just then, both tiny beings in a world we didn’t understand, out of place.
And then you dove back into your temporary burrow and I moved into mine, and perhaps we were less frantic for a time.
It took seeing you a second time for it to click, following my dad’s trailer with the sunshine bumper sticker. You were hurrying away from a random NC highway, and again my mom was beside me, helping me into another temporary home.
Had you just crossed that big, scary expanse of a highway? I too had just made a crossing, heart pounding as I weighed the diverging path before me, as I decided on my personal shift in seasons, my emerging new beginning.
A couple days before I saw you again, as the automated voice said, “Welcome to North Carolina” as I crossed the line, I registered a feeling I couldn’t decipher. Was it regret or a feeling of coming home? I don’t know, but I’ll introspect while I’m less frantic here.
The whole of America looks to you to see if the arrival of spring is near or if the season of dead things will linger. Little do they know you are my own personal harbinger. Now I will look out for you next time I make a move, and if we cease to move together, I hope that only means we have found our permanent home, and that we are both a little less frantic there.
