14
Aliens and Familiar Roads

I distinctly remember the road where my mom almost killed me.

I was six.

It was a bumpy, two-lane country road that brought us out of microscopic Enterprise, Mississippi, and into the big city of Laurel, Mississippi. Twenty-one thousand people strong.

My little sister and I were fighting in the backseat. Melissa always won fights. She should have been born the big sister. She is tough and knows everything about everything, and if she doesn’t, she just makes it up. She can handle blood, fires, mean people, and mysterious noises in the house that sound like snakes or robbers. One time we were babysitting some neighbor kids at our house and I accidentally microwaved a metal pot and sparked a mini fireworks display in the kitchen. With smoke pouring out of the clouded black machine and imminent danger at hand, I did what every responsible babysitter does: I ran out of the house and down the street. Without the kids. Melissa put on oven mitts, braved the fireworks, put out the fire, moved the kids to the living room, and came to find me halfway down the street. Saying she’s my little sister is a technicality.

So my big sister and I were fighting in the backseat. We were sitting side by side because we grew up before children were forced to sit in car seats until they were, like, one hundred pounds or twelve years old or almost in junior high.

We were arguing and pinching each other when my mom stopped the car and killed the lights on the bumpy, two-lane country road. I had never seen anything so black in my life. It was the kind of black that makes you see milky white spots and wonder if you still have legs. The kind of darkness you desperately want to get out of because you are sure, at any moment, a luminous young girl with long, stringy hair and holding a cat will cross the road, look you in the eyes, and cast a spell on you.

“I’m an alien.”

What? You could have heard our pounding hearts outside the car. The voice sounded deep and evil.

“I have come to your land to see how little sisters treat each other. We do not like it when you fight. We do not like it at all.”

She turned the lights on, started the engine, and stared at us, unflinching, a good long minute from the rearview mirror before she began to drive as if nothing had happened.

We were gripped with terror in the backseat.

How could we have been so dumb?

Of course she was an alien. Of course. There were so many clues—so many red flags about this woman—this so-called mom of ours. But those didn’t matter anymore; all that mattered was our escape. We had been tricked by aliens into believing we had an earthling mom, and the only thing we could do now was pray and plan our escape route.

Melissa and I sat trembling, holding hands.

The drive home seemed eternal.

Every pothole a portal to outer space, the home of aliens and bad children.

We held each other’s five- and six-year-old hands with the deepest love and trust ever shared between sisters. Ever.

My mom was brilliant. I will never forget that road.

We remember some roads better than others.

The dirt road leading to Grandpa’s farm. The long road out of town. The winding road through the mountains. Or the one where you pulled over and kissed longer and harder than you ever thought you could. The road that takes you to school, then work, then home again. The road traveled to bury a friend. The road driven to see the country. The road journeyed every year on the same family vacation. The road run by foot to conquer the body or pay tribute to a friend. The road home. To your first home, the one you lived in as a little boy or a little girl when roads felt eternal.

Well-worn and beaten into submission but still standing the test of time, roads are memories kept alive. Living, breathing picture albums.

Give me roads and I will give you my story.

Potholes, pine needles, and parched pavement bring my childhood back to life.

They smell, the roads do. Just take a drive on Interstate 20 between Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi. That is my road. East Texas earth and cows give way to Louisiana pine and swamp. Louisiana pine and swamp give way to muddy Mississippi River and honeysuckle. Sweet summer honeysuckle gives way to humidity and woods so dense you smell Thoreau’s freedom at Walden Pond all the way down on the Natchez. And somehow the smells are all saved, bottled up into the roads like scratch-and-sniff fossils.

My childhood smells like the woods and mud and pine needles and that one long stretch of asphalt. It looks more like exit 33 on Interstate 20 than it does the pictures of me and Mickey Mouse when I was nine years old.

The road, so familiar we forget it is holding us up, delivers us to our memories and our future all at once. So I memorized Interstate 20 from Mississippi to Texas like I’ve memorized every freckle on my daughter’s face.

Something deep inside of me felt anxious to know the way home. In case I ever needed to get back to Mississippi and my parents weren’t there to help me, I vowed to know how. Fanatic road memorization never left me. For well over a decade I have crisscrossed America and memorized her roads. Give me the name of a city I’ve visited and I will tell you how to get to its center, where you might find a good bite to eat, and what highway exit has the cleanest bathrooms on the way out of town.

From Arizona to Mississippi, Michigan to Tennessee, Florida to New Jersey, and all the way up the majestic West Coast, roads are weathered and etched deep into the earth’s surface. Reliable, tried and true. Living, breathing arteries. And when I was a little girl, memorizing roads gave me a sense of security. But now memorizing roads only tricks me into believing I have security. As if detours never happen and arteries don’t stop pulsing with life.

Give me my roads and I will tell you who I am. I will tell you where I have been. Where I am going. And where I will stop for coffee along the way.

Take my roads away, erode their surfaces or swallow them whole in the abyss of the earth’s stomach, and I am lost. Fearfully, painfully lost.

After my burying was done and the most intense season of my grieving had passed, the proverbial road that I was traveling didn’t magically make a sharp right turn, straighten out, and lead me to happily-ever-after land. It was the complete opposite, actually. After the burying, my road disappeared.

During the spring and summer of 2011, the early months of my post–Addison Road life, I spent an embarrassing amount of time wandering around Michaels craft store; I’m pretty sure I kept them in business that year. With no clear-cut direction on how to move forward with my life or what came next, I looked to Martha Stewart and HGTV to fill my days. God only knows how many bottles of glitter I bought that year. Or what that one cashier thought as I entered the store every week, aimlessly roaming the aisles with my toddler in tow for well over an hour, and checking out with an unconscionable amount of Mod Podge.

No longer grieving, I had entered into a season of complete lostness. I was roadless, map-less, and not happy about it. For a girl who took great pride in knowing the lay of the land and having my road mapped out for miles, I quickly realized that lostness was not very becoming on me because I wasn’t good at giving grace to lost people.

The truth was, I had met lost people before and not had much empathy for them. Starting with my husband, who cannot seem to exit for gas off the highway and get back onto the correct side of the road afterward. How is this possible? I don’t understand it! Get back on where you left off! Lost? Just come up with a plan! Find a map, pick a road, and start moving already. Memorize the roads. Waiting on God to show you the next step? Cue my harsh, unloving thoughts that perhaps this lost person might simply be lazy or uninspired. It is a sad but true confession. The answer in my head for lost people was naively simple and heartless. Just take a step already . . . I’m sure God will catch up.

I had a severe lack of empathy for lost people because I had never been truly lost before. But day after day in 2011 I found myself wandering through Target, Michaels, and the grocery store—lost, limp, lifeless. I no more knew what my next step might be, could be, should be, hopefully would be than I did which noodle to pick out. Looking back now I realize that aimlessly walking through Target was the only way I felt any modicum of control over my life. I could no longer decipher a single road map, but I sure as heck could get myself from the home-goods aisles to shoes to makeup. And I clung to what little control I had left while my heart wrapped itself around a foreign concept: sometimes the next step feels like a million miles away. Sometimes you get lost and you are truly, painfully, unavoidably at a complete standstill with nowhere to go. This would become the most humbling season of my life as I learned what grace for the lost girl looked like: having a Guide who knew the map better than me.