Making this town my home, making its people my family
After my second day of law school orientation, I collapsed on my air mattress, holding my fuzzy cat close and weeping, wondering what I had gotten myself into. I felt overwhelmed by the prospect of starting law school, angry at a neighbor who had registered an unreasonable noise complaint against me, frustrated by my inability to find much of anything familiar in Durham, and depressed about the separation between me and the people I loved, including my own husband. I questioned whether I had done the right thing in relocating to Durham, and I wondered if there was any hope that it would improve. Tigger’s warm body and soft purrs were about the only sources of comfort I could find on that dark, humid, despondent third night in the new apartment.
Last night, I found that I wasn’t burdened with as much homework as I had been over the weekend. My only pressing task was to skim through a bunch of rules about filing complaints and motions and such for civil procedure…meh. With my tedious work behind me for the time being, I had the opportunity to whip up a bowl of fluffy, buttery popcorn, crack open a Jones Black Cherry soda, and slouch in a camp chair in front of the TV for a couple of hours. (You know I would have gone for a big, comfy couch, but the big, comfy couch is stuck in Florida until Bruce gets down there to move it for us.) My movie of choice, since I’m not yet equipped with cable TV, was Under the Tuscan Sun, a girly kind of movie that I hadn’t seen in over a year. It had managed to bury itself deep in my DVD collection, but the warm colors of its cover art caught my eye as I was browsing for a selection worthy of the final two or three hours of my Monday evening.
Honestly, I don’t know why I don’t watch this movie more often. It always manages to inspire me in one way or another. Seeing the bright landscapes of Tuscany in the background and watching Frances, the protagonist played by actress Diane Lane, recover from a nasty divorce, buy a rundown villa in a country where she doesn’t even know the language, transform it, and build a family in Italy is quite an uplifting experience. In an early scene of the movie, Frances tries to sleep alone in bed with a violent thunderstorm blowing rain into her room. The only comfort she finds in that desolate moment is from a rendering of the Virgin Mary on the bedhead. She tells a neighbor that she doesn’t feel right living in such a grand house with nobody to cook for, no family, nobody to share it with. But, then she realizes, that there are people to cook for, people to share her life with, a family of choice surrounding her to enrich her life in Italy. As the movie comes to a close, much has changed. It is a bright, sunny day, and Frances is surrounded by friends and family at the wedding reception of a young Italian woman and a Polish construction worker who had assisted with the renovation of her home. Her best friend from San Francisco, another recent victim of heartbreak, is cradling a brand-new baby, and Frances’s life is renewed with hope and fervor.
When I look back on my first experiences in North Carolina, I feel a strange sense of solidarity with this strong, determined, albeit fictitious, character as she courageously handles each challenge coming her way and adapts to a lifestyle that is completely unlike the one she had before. While I speak the language here, with the exception of a few obscure Latin legal phrases (but thankfully I took Latin in high school), almost everything else is foreign: my surroundings, my new apartment, the people, my daily schedule, the way things are generally done, the campus, the weather, the restaurants…I could go on. Gone are the palm trees, theme parks, hurricanes, shopping malls, high school friends, pets, and state parks of Tampa, and now I’m surrounded by many unfamiliar things I have yet to discover. I can’t buy bread from Publix or eat dinner at Dish. I don’t know where Moe’s Southwest Grill is, and I’m not sure which movie theater has the best atmosphere. I don’t know which mall has a Motherhood Maternity or if there’s even a Borders in town. I can’t eat in the cafe at Wild Oats or buy their fragrant incense (not that I would be buying it in my current condition, but it’s the principle of the thing), and I can’t take the doggies to Lettuce Lake Park for a walk on the shady paved trail. On the street where I live are stores I’ve never visited or even heard of, around the universities are local cafes and bookstores which seem indistinguishable from another, in the DULL (a.k.a. library) are faces which are starting to become familiar to me, but whose names, in many cases, I do not yet know.
But there is hope. The girls in my legal writing group seem like people who could later become friends. I have discovered that Kroger brand mozzarella sticks taste better than any mozzarella sticks I have bought in any store. My cat and I have settled into a comfortable routine in the new digs, and my husband will reappear in a couple of short weeks. (Short? Bah. After 11 weeks apart, two weeks is a mere nothing.) Yesterday, I discovered a back way to the grocery store, which incidentally led me by a small Methodist church, the first religious establishment of any kind that I had noticed since moving to Durham. The church which was built next to a creek called New Hope Creek. Spotting the church and the little babbling creek seemed like a little sign from God. Sure, they were just things that I saw on the roadside on the way home, but, to my overtaxed, jaded mind, these simple things represented a sign that, in the coming years, I have new opportunities to reconnect to God and to my spirituality, a chance to connect to this place, and challenges ahead that will make me more sure of myself, more faithful, and a more capable wife, friend, daughter, mother, and Christian. As I take on this adventure of living in a new town, I hope to eventually do what Frances accomplished in Under the Tuscan Sun: truly make this town my own and the people around my my family.