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Baby Organa & Young Skywalker with Scout, Dill, & Gem |
It’s no secret I’ve found my nest near the white sand dunes of
the U.S. Gulf Coast. But, growing up, I knew something slightly different and
once every March/April I’m reminded of that. I’m the product of a Monroe
County, Alabama childhood. First, I lived in a teensy town called Burntcorn before
my family moved to Monroeville around the time of my sister’s birth. Before
moving south to the coast, my parents built their first home in the middle of a
dandelion field in Excel. Little did I know, just a few miles down the weather-beaten
road in Repton, my husband was being raised as well. (Coincidentally, his clan moved to the coast
within a year of mine though we didn’t meet there until I turned eighteen.)

Monroeville is known for many things. It’s billed as the
literary capital of Alabama thanks to the long-time residency of literary giants Truman
Capote and Pulitzer Prize-winner Harper Lee. Popular opinion has established
Monroeville as the real-life equivalent of Maycomb, Alabama, the setting of
Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. To my husband
and me, it’s the place we come back to get our taxes done. We pile the kids
into our road-style Millennium Falcon and hit the interstate. Everything’s
uphill from there. There’s a sign for a Creek Indian Reservation just before our
exit. Monroeville’s a bit off the beaten track. It sits in the center of a
rural county. Gentle green hills roll into fields of crop. The road bumbles
over uncordoned railroad tracks. Tiny towns tick by on the GPS with nothing
much to show for them but quaint city halls, box post offices and southern
churches. There are houses and shop facades Lee and Capote might’ve seen
in the Depression era, some that have been redeemed and renovated
and others that have faded with the times. Our kids offer sound effects as we pass herds of cows, horses, goats, one preserved rail car in Fresco City (not actually a city) and a rusted graffiti train as we close in on our destination...
When we were young, Monroeville seemed like a hopping place,
but the doors of the Vanity Fair visible from the house I lived in when my
sister was born have long been shuttered. The sign for the Goodies department store my
husband remembers his mother often shopping at stands, but the store itself closed
years ago. As we cruise into town, memories come alive. Immediately to our left
is the Monroe County Hospital where my husband was born (all ten pounds, four ounces of him). I
point to the pizza place where one of my favorite birthday parties was held. He
notes the outdoor market where his family regularly bought feed for their menagerie of animals
and the fast food place with its once-wooden playground where he would chase
his brothers. I remember another birthday party there as well as a celebratory
play date after my preschool graduation. We were strangers then, but we can both recall the exact sound of
the rickety bridge that stretched from tower to tower, the grainy texture and
earthy scent of the bark mulch that littered much of the lot. I can still taste
and feel the cold sticky touch of a vanilla soft serve ice cream cone dripping
down my arm faster than I could eat it while my friend and I hid from the
summer sun, resting against the cool walls of the round metal tunnel.

Our priority for much the journey involves sitting in an
office building for an hour plus. For the last two years, we’ve rewarded the kids for behaving (mostly) so our trusty accountant can tell us how
much we owe our government by taking them to the Monroe County Heritage Museum. Here lies the legacy of Harper Lee and Truman Capote.
The impressive brick structure with its white clock tower was once
Monroeville’s city hall and was used as the model for the courthouse in the
film version of To Kill a Mockingbird.
It hosts the Alabama Writer’s Symposium, reading clubs, teacher workshops,
theatrical productions of To Kill a
Mockingbird and more. Since being made into a museum, the main part houses
an life-size replica of the courthouse from the Oscar-winning movie. It’s also the
centerpiece for the downtown walking tour and bus tour featuring the homes of
Lee and Capote, the law office of Lee’s father (the inspiration behind the
character Atticus Finch), and even the site of the hotel where Gregory Peck
stayed in preparation for filming To Kill
a Mockingbird.
This year, the museum was closed by the time we arrived, but
the kids still got to run around the gardens and picnic area, interact with the
statues of Scout, Gem and Dill and sneak in on an outdoor rehearsal for an
upcoming performance of To Kill a
Mockingbird. In the last afternoon light, I got to watch my daughter walk
all by herself up the steps to the rotunda and hear my son giggle from his
hiding spot behind a jasmine-lined trellis. We snapped pictures on the bench as
we did last year for retrospect. We soaked in the last glow of nostalgia and my
husband snipped the end off a jasmine vine by way of a fragrant memento.
On the ride south toward home, I watched the sun sink beneath a tree-lined horizon. I was
overwhelmed by nostalgia. I love the rich environment my parents eventually migrated to, just as I
love raising my children there just as they did. Monroeville is a simple town. The pace
of life there hasn't changed much since I was a girl. Yet I’m nevertheless struck
by how fortuitous I was to have lived there – to at any point have been
rolling my miniature shopping cart next to my mother’s at the Piggly Wiggly
passing the distinguished likes of Harper Lee in the aisle -- to have accidentally bumped
into the kid-sized version of my future spouse on the playground as children
are ought to do. It’ll be years before our kids grasp why we continuously pilgrimage to the place neither of us think of as home anymore. But hopefully, one
day, they’ll understand the sentiment as much as the history behind it.

There's still a chance to follow the virtual book tour for my latest Superromance novel, Wooing the Wedding Planner, for a chance to win a $50 Barnes & Noble Gift Card! Offer ends April 28th. Enter here!
1 comment:
sounds like a wonderful town
denise
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