I was six when we landed in North Carolina and that's the one that stuck. born in Houston, four years of Texas i don't remember at all, one year in California i can barely account for, then Cary. i don't really count the stuff before Cary.

the first thing i remember about Cary is the clay. red clay stains everything. it got in my sneakers and the knees of my jeans and my mom fought the washing machine over it for years and mostly lost. when it rained the yard turned to slop and we slid around in it, because obviously. years later i went and got a whole degree that was more or less about that dirt, but i didn't know that yet, i just liked it.

and the thunderstorms! people out west ask me what i miss and i say the storms, because a carolina thunderstorm COMMITS. the sky goes green-black over the pines, the air gets thick and sweet, the first fat drops hit the hot asphalt and make that smell (you know the smell?), and then the whole thing lets go at once. gutters roaring, the creek behind the neighborhood coming up fast, thunder close enough to buzz the windows. we'd put the garage door up and watch.

we were not exactly from there, my family. grandparents from near Dundee in Scotland, my grandfather the first in the line to go to university instead of down the mines. then Canada, then South Africa where my dad grew up, Zambia where my mom was born, the two of them meeting in Cape Town and hopping to London before it all somehow came to rest in a pine town in the north carolina piedmont. geology has a term for stuff that ends up a long way from where it formed (transported material). anyway.

there was a sister, Zona. silly and worried and creative and empathetic all at once, my co-conspirator and co-defendant. we had a treehouse in the backyard that we filled with cards and candles and secrets. and there were dogs, starting with a dog named Dog (her whole entire name, we were not fancy people). she got sick at the end and she was a good dog the whole way through it, still wagging at us. i'm not gonna write more of that here. it was the first big grief i ever had and i have been a dog person at a frankly unreasonable level ever since.

then we got older and started pushing at the edges of the town. we made slide gloves out of tile samples glued onto hardware store gloves and bombed hills on longboards (the brakes are your shoes, for anyone wondering). push sessions that went stupid distances, one summer all the way to Chapel Hill, hours and hours down country roads just to say we did it. we biked to Umstead and found the old mine and dared each other at the mouth of it. we found the tunnels that run under the ponds around Cary and went in with flashlights. cross country summers we ran our miles then biked to Southpoint for the air conditioning. we snuck off campus. capers, basically.

somewhere in there, music. a ska band at the Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh (twice!), horns everywhere, the whole floor bouncing. easily two of the best shows i have ever seen, and I have re-checked that ranking plenty of times since.

and i had friends who would show up in my room unannounced and tell me it was time to skate. hard to beat that.

Chapel Hill was twelve miles away by longboard. then one day it turned out to be where i was headed for four years, to study rocks of all things. but that's the next one.