Refrain

It’s been 25 years since I lived on the beach. Twenty-five years since my single mother packed up and took my little sister and me across the country from Florida to Idaho, where my Southeast Asian skin cracked from the dry air.

We moved in with my mom’s lifelong friend when we got there. The house was in a field next to a small airport for crop dusters. The light on the tower would circle all night long and flash in through the balcony doors at the end of the upstairs hallway. Sometimes for fun we would camp out in the hallway, and the light would keep us awake.

Mom’s friend, Karol, had two daughters, Mina and Anna. Mina was the older daughter, but she was a couple of years younger than me. We’d known each other our whole lives. Like me she was half Asian, but her half was from China. Having so many shared experiences and a similar sense of origin made Mina like a second sister to me.

We arrived in Idaho in early October. I brought snow pants on my first day at school. Mina had said it might snow, and I wanted to be ready if it did. I wasn’t used to snow, and I didn’t know what to expect. It didn’t snow for another month.

I forgot about this incident until months later when an older kid in study hall said, “Oh! You’re the kid who brought snow pants to the first day of school, aren’t you?” There were too many rumors circulating about me and my family to keep track of. I hadn’t been aware of this one. It was small compared to the others.

Mom was what I would later describe as “an impetuous hippie,” which was one part cruel and one part pretentious. Using big words helped me feel better about my informal early education and my later rural conservative education.

We had rolled into town in a bright red 1993 Dodge Caravan with bumper stickers. There were quite a few of them, but most important was the rainbow flag. Mom was in the process of buying a home when we moved. When that fell through, we moved in with a woman who needed a roommate. This happened to be right across the street from my fifth-grade teacher’s house.

Naturally, the town assumed Mom was a lesbian, and it was big news for a small town. Word on the street was that my teacher had started the rumor. One night, Mom and our roommate were sharing a bottle of red wine and talking about it, and Mom got a little sassy. Our roommate’s bedroom had a sliding glass door that looked out across the street, and mom decided to give my teacher something to talk about.

“Oh, yeah, Mrs. Hoffman?” she said, and then mimicked hi-hats with a “CH-ch-ch-CH-ch-ch-CH” as she pantomimed a striptease through the window. We all laughed.

I’m moving back to Jacksonville in less than a month. I booked my POD last night. I’ve been a liberal living in conservative states for about a decade now. Moving to another conservative state isn’t ideal, but it’s a step in the right direction, and I’m excited to get back to the beach.