At 44

Last year, I wrote a personal update for the paid subscribers. People seemed to like it, so I am doing it again. If you’d rather not know the person behind the humor (and I understand that sentiment!), it’s okay to sit this one out. The silly articles on the free side of the paywall will continue, more or less on schedule. Thanks for reading and subscribing. —M

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When I was a kid, I would go out in the early evening and wander around the back yard of my family’s home. My parents built fences around their children, to keep us safe: homeschooling, church, plus a sort of curious, shifting quasi-fundamentalism in which certain Christian music was too sinful, but some R-rated movies were okay. And of course they also built an actual fence, a six-foot wooden barrier that wrapped around the property and protected their children from the witches and demons that populated Jack Chick and Frank Peretti stories.

Sometimes, I would press my face against the slats and peer through the gaps, straining to see over the drainage ditch and Bailey Cove Road, trying to see what else could be out there. I didn’t know; I couldn’t see the world. But sometimes I could hear it: in the summer, aluminum pings from baseball games at the nearby park would bleed through the thick Alabama haze and pass over us. I could hear the faint din of parents shouting, urging their little Dusty or Sarah around the base path.

In these moments, I remember feeling intensely sad, in a way that I struggled to understand. It was an urgent yearning to be somewhere other than my back yard. That I was supposed to be someplace. But I had no idea where. It wasn’t really about the park, or anywhere in particular; we went to that park sometimes. I had even played t-ball there. I was just supposed to be somewhere.

With no other recourse, I would settle into staring at Green Mountain, which rose sharply behind our house. Supposedly it was attached, albeit loosely, to the Appalachian foothills. That made it sound important, I guess. The mountain was far too large and too close for our fence to block out. Fences have their limitations.

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