Comfort Creek

1. Moving

When most folks move, they hire a van and some men to pack up their belongings. Not in Panther Ridge, Florida, though. In Panther Ridge they jack up the house and slide these huge steel beams with wheels on them right under the whole building, attach everything to a big tractor trailer, and drive off.

That's how all us townsfolk moved. One by one, house by house. Some to the Oaks, some to the Pines, and some, like my family, to the middle of nowhere, till nothing was left of Panther Ridge but its name and a forest of stark-naked cinder-block stumps sitting in the dirt.

The day our house was moved, we cruised right down Main Street. Course, we weren't moving much faster than a slug in a snowstorm. My kid sister, Rhonda Fay, and me rode on the front porch, and Pa-Daddy and my big sister, snotty old Louise, rode in the pickup right behind us.

Then came my great-grandma Nanny Jo Pearl and her latest husband, E.B. And finally, the rest of the work crew in their trucks. It was a regular little parade.

Louise had slid herself so far down in the front seat of the pickup, all we could see was the top of the dark-green baseball cap her boyfriend, Lloyd, has given her. It looked like Pa-Daddy was escorting a big old watermelon around town. Louise wasn't about to be seen with her family. She thinks she's such a big deal because she's going to be a sophomore in high school next fall.

"Hey, Pa-Daddy," I yelled loud as could be. "Who's the watermelon head you got riding with you?" Louise's head popped up far enough so I could see her eyes, green as Lloyd's baseball cap.

Pa-Daddy pulled his old engineer's cap down over his forehead, stuck his head out the window, and shouted, "Quinnella Jeanne Ellerbee, if you can't behave yourself, you can ride in the back of the truck."

"Me!" I said. "What'd I do? Louise is the one acting like we're all a bunch of Neanderthals she wouldn't be caught dead with."

Pa-Daddy was clenching his teeth. I just smiled back at him, sweet as you please, and started waving to people on the street, which is what folks in a parade are supposed to do. Rhonda Fay sat in the porch rocker, laying low, as they say. Her face was beet red from embarrassment. She and Louise are a lot alike that way.

"You think you're some beauty queen riding a parade float," she said. I could hear the rocker sqeauking up a storm behind me, but I just kept one hand saddled on the porch rail and the other one busy waving, like I hadn't heard a word. I figured the best thing was to keep myself occupied or I'd have to think about all this moving business. It was downright unnerving. Everything was happening too darn fast. I felt like I'd got myself sucked into a wind tunnel, with no way out.

Just that morning Nanny Jo and me had been packing up the breakables, and the next thing we knew, these men were sliding rails under the house. When we peeked out the back door to see how things were coming along, this red-faced man with a ponytail and the longest mustache I'd ever seen------it curled right under his double chin----climbed into his tractor trailer and backed it up to the beams. I wanted to climb right up on that rig, pound on the window, and tell that red-faced man to put that house right back where it belonged. But, of course, I didn't.

Now all I could do was look down the street at the cinder-block stumps where the houses used to be. Where only the week before I'd been sitting on the front porch, gnawing on sugarcane Nanny Jo had cut from the old Atwell place down the road. I could almost feel those sweet, chewy fibres scrape across my tongue just thinking about it.

There I was, not even a block away and already I was homesick, which might sound pretty strange, considering we were bringing our house with us. But the truth is, a lot of other things go into making a person feel at home. School friends, good neighbors, the Atwells' sugarcane, Mr. Cantrell at the company store tossing in a few extra pieces of red licorice when we bought candy from him.