The Nate Years

Because east Texas is bloody hot and humid in the summer, I've been forcing myself out of bed at ungodly hours to go for a walk when it's cool-ish. The house I'm home-sitting is in my old 'hood where I grew up, and it's been nice to wander the streets and see the memory of my 10-year-old self riding her bike around. That was during what I like to call, my "Nate Years." Basically, I was a tall, flat-chested girl who chopped her hair as short as my mother would allow. I wore a backwards baseball cap, had scrapes on my knees, and all my closest friends were guys. I even went by "Nate" for a while. Essentially, I was as tomboy as you could possibly get, and yet, ironically, I was also incredibly boy crazy.

This morning, I walked past the creek bed my friends and I used to play in. It's overgrown now; there must be snakes galore lurking in the underbrush. Now that I think about it, I'm not exactly sure what we were doing in the creek bed for hours at a time. I have vague memories of daring each other to jump from one side of the ditch to the other and swinging from tree branches. When there was a drought, we'd run through the tunnels that went under the road, despite my mother's demands not to do so. Who knows what else we did or what we talked about; I just know I still have a lot of random scars. But, I like to think we were using our imaginations to create a different world that was free and far away from everything that was real. We didn't have cell phones or ipods or computers or agendas. We were just living - and avoiding the snakes, I suppose.

People worry about me moving to Alaska in a year, but I usually laugh at them because their arguments don't make sense. They think I'm going to freeze to death, but I can't wait to get away from this heat. It gives me heat rash and I sweat all the time. The darkness in the winter will take some getting used to, but I kind of thrive at night anyway. "It's so far away," is usually the ultimate argument, but isn't that exactly the point? It's like running away from the distractions of the norm and being forced to live differently than I've ever had to live before. I'm looking at it as a way to get back to the Nate Years. I don't intend to dig out my old baseball cap or anything - even though I think I still have it. I just think Alaska is exactly the kind of adventure I would have imagined when I was playing in the ditch - just maybe with sub-zero temperatures.