Almost Heaven, West Virginia

So Meridith is moving across the country tomorrow, a fact with which I have been coping through good old fashioned denial.  It ain't just a river in Egypt, people.  I don't see her so often that I cannot for the most part pretend she's still right where I left her and just busy, but I was listening to - of all things - John Denver this morning on the way to work and it struck me.  Not that I'm losing anything, but for reasons unbeknownst to me I suddenly could feel that which has already been lost.  

When I moved to Denver from West Virginia as a child - it was 1984 and I was almost 13 - the song "Country Roads" was the song playing on the radio when we pulled away from our house on a street I called home and one which I have never seen since.  As a hormonal preteen I realize that my emotion got the best of me at that moment and I cried and felt a deep sense of resentment at my parents, who seemingly packed us up to move across the country without so much as asking me how I felt about that.  Even more infuriating retrospectively is that my father said to me, "don't worry, you'll like our new house much better."  Not only was that not true in any way, but it was so patronizing, like a child of 12 couldn't possibly be suffering something deeper than leaving a house when listening to "take me home, country roads, to the place I belong, West Virginia."  I know now that what I felt was a profound sense of loss ahead of the fact; I knew at some level that I would never be in that spot on that ground again, and if I were ever to return, it would be a different place entirely.  In fact, I have not gone there on purpose because I don't want the idyllic memory of that home destroyed.  Of course it was never as wonderful as I remember it but I can't see any reason to prove that to myself.  

On I-25, right about 8th Avenue, that song came on the radio and I sang along with nostalgia and quite to my surprise, teared up and nearly lost it.  I scarcely think about life in West Virginia anymore except in the idealized parts of my youth there, but it's part of me.  I know that I could never have stayed there, and had I done so, would probably be a fat housewife in a trailer with four or more kids, chain-smoking generic cigarettes and living on a coal miner's salary.  That's a cliche, but it's also a fact for a large percentage of people in that state and for most of them, it's all they know and they live on in ignorant bliss and attend church on Sundays.  But I am well aware that my own sense of the world would not have permitted this kind of life and I fear that I would have buckled under the pressure to accept it and be miserable rather than breaking those bonds and venturing out in to the world.  It terrifies me to think that I may have been a completely different person had we not moved to Colorado and yet something in me yearns for the simplicity of youth and country roads.  It's not real, it never was real, and perhaps that is the saddest part about it all.  Sometimes you cannot go home again.