From my front porch coffee spot, I can hear more than see the construction workers’ antics over at Keith’s. A scream resembling Tarzan’s call when mobilizing from vine to vine—or a midair utterance after a panicky cliff dive—echoes through the trees. The yowl is loud, jagged, slicing through our shared country road and past the loose-leafed water oaks before it hits my ear. I experience the sound in my body with an oh no. It’s too loud not to be a nail through the hand or a slip off the ladder—but the twingey twang at the end, like an olly olly oxen free mixed with the screech of car tires and no follow-up crunch, signifies all is still well.
Keith is Maria’s cousin. The house he’s adding onto and remodeling has sat basically unused for years, ever since his mother’s—or as she’s more commonly referred to, Aunt Faye’s—death. It’s a 1,500-square-foot, weathered light-green house set back at an angle facing the road. It’s the first house you see past the school; we’re the second. The Hudson family owns hundreds of acres around here, so if I look to the left, right, straight ahead, or probably even behind me in the ravine, they own it.
Although they’re not my family by blood, I’ve been welcomed in as if we were—invited to birthday parties, crawfish boils, and even Christmas.
I remember my family doing the same with boyfriends—specifically, Joey. He had presents under my grandma’s tree and eggnog in my parents’ refrigerator, so I learned early the ways of adopting and loving on people, even if they aren’t blood.
I was never blood in my family anyway. Adopted at birth, I’ve always carried a one-foot-in, one-foot-out sense of “family,” knowing I was loved and accepted and one of them, yet aware of an unknown set of people out there—an extension of me. I lifted the roof off that dollhouse years later when I traveled with my birth mother to stay for a weekend in central Oregon. In their company, I shared blood, and in that deep genealogical root, I found myself searching their faces and our conversation for more of “me.”
I can always find that commonality, blood or not. Even living out here, among people who were strangers less than a year ago, I find myself gravitating toward what we share: a love for the country, for the quiet, for a community that holds together with the strength of a palm-sized spider on its web.
Maybe that’s what belonging really is—finding threads that hold, even when the web keeps changing.
Love, Jaclynn
Going On 40 