Ebenezer Road

I WAS LUCKY ENOUGH to grow up on the same eighteen acres where my mother grew up. And for most of my life, my grandparents lived on the land as well. As you turn off Ebenezer Road—the double mailbox on your left, the gazebo covering a freshwater well on your right—the driveway crunches under your car tires because it is pure gravel. (Just ask my right elbow. I still have a pretty pronounced scar from a quick turn out of my grandparents’ sidewalk on my bicycle sometime around third grade. I spilled. Hard. And my elbow can still prove it.)

The grapevines are there on your left as well, three rows of them, and if you look just over them, there’s a small but impressive garden. The yard continues to the fence that touched our neighbor’s property.

From Ebenezer Road, headed up the drive, my grandparents’ house is on your right. And then on the left is our house, and just as you look past the front porch and the front door, you see a pond with a grassy trail circling full around it.

My grandfather moved to the farmland on Ebenezer Road in 1941. And for a time, it operated as such. By the time my parents were married and pregnant with me (the first grandchild), the place where the barn sat was better suited to be a home, so my parents built one. Within months after I was born, they moved out of my grandparents’ house, where they had been living, just across the driveway to the house that would be ours.

I’ve ridden my bicycle over every inch of those eighteen acres. I’ve played house and played basketball and pretended to be a television host (me) interviewing guests (also me). I’ve built forts and created worlds and raced sticks down the creek behind the pond.

I have some of the weirdest memories of being little at that house. Running around in a summertime rainstorm in just my undies, while my mom sat on the porch, towel in hand. And like other young, murderous monsters (aka all of us), I caught fireflies and put them in jars with a few blades of grass and maybe poked two holes in the top of the metal lid. But my new pets were always dead the next morning. . . . Don’t look at me like that, you KNOW you did it too.

I also remember snapping beans on the front porch of my grandparents’ house while sitting next to my mom and my grandmother. My memory isn’t precise, but in one particular recollection, some of the details are so strong. It was summer and I was wearing shorts, but it wasn’t incredibly hot. Though to be honest, if we were snapping beans on the front porch on a summer evening in Georgia, it probably was hot. But my brain doesn’t remember that part. There was one section of the porch that was always cool because it was always in the shade. The floor was cement and bordered with bricks. I can almost feel that spot again, my bare legs touching the cool cement, a colander in my lap.

The long beans were in a green plastic bag of some sort from the local farmers market, and we each had our own colander. The first move was to pull off the long string from the tip of the bean to the tail, then break the pod into three or four bean-length sections. You knew you’d gotten the right spot when it snapped. It’s like the bean always knew. I was never a huge fan of chores, like many children I am sure, but there was something about snapping beans. It mattered. It was outside, it was with my family, it was a task that had a successful ending every time.

Snapping beans was simple. I wouldn’t have been able to put that word around it as a child, but I know now that the spot it filled in me was the spot that loves simplicity. I don’t know what was running through my grandmother’s mind as she sat there, or my mother’s, but I’m sure the task couldn’t have felt as simple to them as it did to me. I was probably thinking about a book I was reading or a friend at school or absolutely nothing.

I miss thinking about nothing.

J. R. R. TOLKIEN ONCE WROTE, “Certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it.”1

Eden is the first place humans ever lived, according to the Bible. In Genesis 2, before there was sin and before there was the brokenness we all feel, there was Eden. It was a garden and it was perfect. The humans there worked and gardened and cared for the animals and loved each other with no shame. And it was how things were always meant to be.

Though none of us have been there, don’t you sometimes miss it? Maybe those simple memories of snapping beans are so strong because they feel like an Eden that I long for. My childhood was not perfect, but I do have certain memories, like snapping beans with my grandmother, that remind me of something that I feel has slipped through my fingers.

I SEE A NATUROPATH a few times a year. I started back in 2015 when I had this nagging cough and repeated laryngitis. I would speak at events on Friday and Saturday, lose my voice by Saturday night, whisper and cough until Monday or Tuesday, get a steroid shot on Thursday, and be back out on the road, preaching with my steroid-powered voice to a room of people, on Friday night. The pattern repeated for weeks, and each time I lost my voice, I was scared it might not come back. So a friend directed me to Robin, and through homeopathic remedies, oils, and supplements, we healed my body in a lot of different ways.

I saw Robin this week and told her some weird things that are going on with my body. I told her how it feels like everything inside of me is holding on and nothing is letting go. I feel big—not fat but solid, like I can’t release things. We tested my emotions—the tightness between your emotional health and physical health is immense—and the main emotion that came up was a feeling of being abandoned.

That word appears almost every time she tests me.

But it doesn’t make me cry. It doesn’t bring up bad memories. I wasn’t abandoned as a child, and I don’t feel abandoned by a romantic partner. The actual definition of abandon is “lack of protection, support, or help from.”2 And as we read over the test results this time, I looked at Robin with clear and sober eyes and said, “Yes, that is true of me. I spend every day thinking about how I am in charge of myself, how no one else is thinking of me, how I have no covering.”

It’s a challenge for me to be single today. As my job and public image increase, my desire for a protector increases as well. And yes, I feel abandoned in the sense that I feel alone in my life. (I know married men and women who may feel the same thing—this isn’t a uniquely unmarried feeling, but it is a feeling an unmarried person could have. Example, me.)

That feeling of being alone is not something I thought about when I was a kid on the cool cement porch snapping beans for dinner. I didn’t think about a life at forty where I’m in charge of everything, a life where every buck stops with me. I wasn’t thinking about bills or social media or growing a business or moving my laundry (IF THAT DRYER BEEPS ONE MORE TIME!) or what would happen to me at eighty-nine if I were still the only one in my family.

It was simpler then, with the beans on the porch. I was just Annie.

I THINK when we go looking for fun what we are actually looking for is home. We are looking for peace. We are looking for simplicity, something to fill that spot that has been left by growing up or growing out or moving on. While we think we want fun, what we really want is Eden.

A few years ago my parents moved to a new house. The one on Ebenezer Road wasn’t the right fit for them after my grandparents passed away and all of us kids left home. I have struggled with my parents moving out of that house. To be fair, it’s not my decision and I have no vote here. They deserve to live wherever they want to live. I moved my entire life to Nashville over a decade ago. They gave me that permission; I should offer them the same. But this loss has felt profound to me. All of our family events took place on those eighteen acres for our whole lives: Christmas mornings, Thanksgiving dinners, birthdays, random summer nights, Sunday afternoons after family lunch at a buffet restaurant down the street that made NEXT LEVEL delicious yeast rolls.

I asked my counselor about it a few weeks ago—why I want every man I date to see the old house, why I’m the one who got teary on Christmas, saying “I just want to go home,” even though the whole family was together in my parents’ beautiful new house. My counselor has a lot of thoughts. Most of them float around the idea of how safe I felt there and how many of my memories are tied to places, even more than people.

That’s weird, right? Because I’m so extroverted you’d think I’d attach my memories to humans, but more often than not, my memories anchor in a place.

So while I know it isn’t my house anymore, and while there are plenty of memories there that have shaped me in all the right ways and some of the wrong ways, I also know that I’ve lost something by losing the house on Ebenezer Road. I feel it deeply.

WE DON’T LIVE on a very good planet. (No offense, Earth.) It’s just not going all that well here, is it? We have lost Eden in every way, but I’ve come to realize that it’s the moments of fun that remind us that Eden ever existed in the first place. I may not be able to meet you there, but something inside of me knows what it feels like there. Something reminiscent of snapping beans on the front porch.