Homesick

Earlier today, I read this article about trees in Louisville. It made me homesick for the city: golden leaves in fall, immense-trunked ancient trees, older than most of the buildings in the town I live in now, sweeping down broad lawns of summer green.

I was only in Louisville for a few months, from August or September of one year through April or May or June of the next, but I fell in love with Ear X-stacy and Zteca and a coffeshop that offered the best cardamom team I’d ever drunk. I clomped amazedly through crisp and shattering snow on my way out for coffee and the paper on weekend mornings, ran down big green hills in the park in spring. Sometimes at night the drifting blue of the Union Pacific’s infinite train whistle kept me up, and I would lay peacefully awake, shoveled in amongst blankets, between the chill of the never-quite-shut-tight historic single-pane windows and the barrelling warmth of after-add central heating in my carriage-house apartment.

It wasn’t really Louisville, after all that – my place was across the river in New Albany, Indiana. But I went to the hemp store on Bardstown Road when I started to miss sewing and California-ness (I bought the softest, silkiest hemp fabric I could find and made a bathrobe), and when I went out for drinks with the crew after work the places we drank, when not raised high above the river on stilts, were all in Louisville. It was the nearest big city, the center of gravity, and at that time I still generally gravitated toward cities. Louisville was a graceful one, and lovely.

I miss it sometimes.