Home-Grown Memories

[Archive: This is my FIRST blog from 2018, your introduction to me.]

Welcome! I’m Alarie Tennille. I’m so glad you stopped by my first blog. This is an open house, so please look around my website while you’re here. I hope you’ll come back often and invite friends and family. I invite you to subscribe, so you won’t miss a thing.

So where do I start? How about taking a trip back to my hometown with me? [This event was in 2018.]

In June, I’ll be going to Portsmouth, Virginia to give my first poetry reading there. I’m very excited, because I’ll be seeing some friends I haven’t seen since high school and some for even longer than that. I’d love to see you there, too. (Details at the end.) 

I’m also happy to be reading at a library. My first memory of the Portsmouth Public Library was of a dark, cramped space with tight aisles and sagging floors. An older friend tells me it was housed in the old courthouse pictured above. I had my photo taken there by a sneaky photographer when I was about five years old. I was sitting atop a stepstool in the stacks, so deeply into my storybook that I didn’t notice the man. Mama wanted to step in and comb my hair, but he told her that would spoil the surprise. My photo ran in The Virginian Pilot-Ledger Star during National Library Week. 

I have even warmer memories of the current Main Public Library on Court Street, where I researched many a high school paper and went to escape the boredom of summer vacation. Yes, I was a nerd, bookworm, and future English major. Future writer, too, you suggest. No, I was already a writer. I began writing stories for FUN in the third grade. Didn’t everyone? 

What is home? Each of us has a personal answer. As a child, home was where my parents lived. Unfortunately, my mother died soon before my move to Kansas City, MO, and my father soon after. I was 1200 miles from everyone I knew and loved, and this was in the 80s, before email and Facebook. Aside from a few Christmas cards each year, I lost touch with Portsmouth.

For 36 years, I’ve been homesick for the sea. (I also miss 18th c. architecture, fresh seafood, azaleas, crepe myrtles, milder winters, and more.) A couple of years ago, we drove straight through Portsmouth to catch a plane in Norfolk. The poem below explains the complicated emotions of trying to go back home when home has become a different place. “Homecoming” is generally written as one word, but I chose to make it two to show the disconnection I was feeling. “Homecoming” to me, means class reunions with parades down High Street or at least family reunions. I was coming back to a place that had changed almost as much as I had. 

Home Coming

To go back to your hometown

and find it doesn’t recognize you.

To see your old house bedraggled

like hand-me-downs left to Goodwill –

gutters stripped, azaleas gone for no good

reason except it’s not your home.

To dread awkward reunions almost as much

as not running into anyone you know.

To get a little lost, finding landmarks

have run away with your childhood.

To startle at the silver-haired man

walking by who’s too much like your dad.

To feel gutted by the gap that was

your high school, but jealous

of a new museum and elegant restaurants

where you’ll never have a favorite table.

To understand this strange place 

doesn’t feel like home, but always will be.

© 2017 Alarie Tennille.

First published in Poetry Breakfast.