Return to Texas
Re-remember my birthplace.
Here I come, lame duck.
I heard thrilling news at work today. I’m going to San Antonio for a conference in November! It will be just a few weeks after a new president is elected, and George W. Bush, who has cast a bit of a pallor over one of my favorite autobiographical facts for the last seven and a half years, will by then just be waiting out the last of his last term.
I’ve always been proud that I was born in Texas. Not many kids in Connecticut come from too far west of the Ohio River or south of the Mason-Dixon line. Having San Antonio on my birth certificate, learning to crawl while my parents kept their eyes open for scorpions and roly-poly bugs (delicious!), playing in patches of bluebells, riding around the Alamo in a stroller, teething on tortillas—these things made my infancy and toddlerhood special. I love that I was once a yellow rose.
