Anna-Claire Wilcox, Senior, Writing and Social Work Major from Orange, CA.
I was born in Monterey, California.
Beating the drum of the nomads,
holding no images of the town that birthed me.
My mother’s escape from generational poverty
in explorative experience, my father’s calling from
boyhood. Creating the conditions for my wandering.
Stafford, Virginia included a plastic playhouse, a
big black dog, and a driveway that loomed over
me an elevated mountain of asphalt.
Okinawa, Japan featured a fenced in slice of American
reality, swaying apartment buildings, typhoons, and square cut
houses bordering a tropical jungle of snakes and banana spiders.
Natural disasters and wars troubled these playful days.
Deployed to the deserts of Afghanistan, the seas of the Middle East,
the calamity of the Indonesian and Japanese tsunamis.
Newport, Rhode Island, inhabited by smug classical mansions
and a red-rusting bridge that mused my 1st grade art. Each house
connected like cookies not cut apart and my first memory of frost.
Camp Pendleton, California, a great stretch of base with
a thousand cul-de-sacs and little girls missing a parent for the
school year. A grand celebration, reintroduction, and a homecoming.
Aiea, Oahu separated from school friends racing by, by
thin crosses of wire reaching a mile down the hill. A house with a view
of Waikiki beach and a lush jungle scratching at its back.
An Easter celebrated with my mother’s traditions and my father’s
antics, cascarónes sling shotted to the sky. A winter searching
the island for masa for our Christmas tamales.
Radnor, Pennsylvania a vintage house with too many windows
in the woods of trees too tall and fragile. A very cold selection of
winters and a driveway brutally long when holding a shovel.
A retirement and end of relationship, a farewell to active military
society, a retreat from bases comforts and cages, a relief for safety
and unity, a beginning and an end, another uprooting.
Brock, Texas a yellow civilian farmhouse backed up to a spring cow
pasture set ablaze by bright booms of lightning. A town featuring a
gas station, high school, bank, diner, secrets and scandals born in boredom.
Orange, California a house with a hill of vegetation and a familiar
town circle. Access to childhood memories further south and an
ability to visit or stay. A comfortable place to progress. For now.
Nomadic patterns follow them all now as a constant yearning to
be with beginnings and ends. A restlessness birthed from sampling
cultures in childhood like ice cream flavors in a parlor.
This family of mine, imprinted on by the people, places, and scenes
wandered through. A home a bodily tent, a cannister of experiences
and a book with the traditions of my mother and father.