I return to my homeland...

My Alabama born & raised husband must really love me, because he let me talk him into moving to Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1988. Jeff and I were both 24 years old, had already been married nearly four years. We had been renting a three-bedroom house in Montgomery Alabama that was owned by Jeff’s parents. There was a settled quality to our lives that was rare for our age and far too predictable. Our life in Montgomery stretched before us into the future in a monotonous ribbon of sameness that for me felt intolerable. Though I had lived in Montgomery, Alabama for six years by that time, I had never adapted to the place. I found the hot, humid weather insufferable, the culture oftentimes baffling. I missed cool summers, snowy winters and lefsa. I missed Minnesota; I missed “home.” Something had to give.

And give it did.

Jeff and I moved to the Twin Cities, got good jobs and in one year managed to buy our first home. Less than a year later we had our daughter Lily, an incredibly sweet natured and good child. Well okay, she had her share of spunkiness, but that just made her more interesting.

Then the cold started getting to us. One Christmas day, we found ourselves frigidly barreling down the highway to my cousin Shirley’s house in sub-zero temperatures. Lily was so wrapped up in multiple layers of clothing and blankets that she was hardly recognizable as a human being. She looked more like a pile of dirty laundry stuffed into the carseat. It was so cold in our car that the heater gave no relief, and I had to keep scraping the ice off the inside of the front windshield that was continually frosting over with the frozen moisture of our breaths. Jeff had the gall to say, “Try not breathe so much will you.” As we say up north, Uffdah!

Yeah, yeah, “the woods are lovely dark and deep” on snowy evenings as Robert Frost put so eloquently, but they can be freakin’ frigid as #%&* too. You can tell Mr. Robert Frost I said that.

Wimps that we were, we accepted a bribe from Jeff’s parents, if we would move back to the south with their only grandchild, we could live rent-free in their Florida beach house. Hot diggity dog! What a deal. Our stay Minnesota had lasted four years.