Welcome Back to Pennsylvania! Or Not.

  

I thought I missed the bay in Fairhope, Alabama. Turns out, I missed something much bigger. I mean, I do miss the bay. I miss waking up early and walking along Mobile Bay while the sun came up. I miss the pelicans dive bombing the water, the enormous live oak trees, the beautiful cottage homes lovingly cared for.

But mostly, I miss people saying good morning. People walking toward me said it. People walking their dogs said it. People riding bicycles said it. Sometimes the bicycle people would come up behind me, where I couldn't even see them, and still call out, "Morning!" as they passed. This fascinated me. There was absolutely no social obligation to greet me. We hadn't made eye contact. I wasn't blocking the bike path. They didn't need directions. I posed no immediate threat to their safety. And yet: "Morning!" It was as if the mere fact that we were both awake, outdoors and participating in Tuesday was sufficient reason to acknowledge one another. I loved it.

Then I came home to Pennsylvania. I should probably mention that I hadn't particularly wanted to come home. For family, yes! But I'd spent several weeks traveling through the South, and somewhere along the way I had become annoyingly happy. I had energy. I was writing. I was talking to strangers. Strangers were talking to me. I was taking long walks every morning and looking forward to them. Frankly, I was becoming unbearable.

Then I came home. Almost immediately, I decided to look for a little part-time job. Nothing terribly ambitious. Just something to get me out of the house, around people and making a little money while I worked on my writing. A local restaurant was hiring. Perfect! I like the restaurant. I have front-of-house experience. I applied. The woman wrote back and explained that you had to be at least 16 to host and 18 to serve. Was I within those age requirements? I laughed. Oh, honey! I wrote back enthusiastically that yes, I qualified. In fact, I had been qualifying for quite some time. A few decades, give or take. I told her I had front-of-house experience and explained that I'd been out of work for the past year because my husband had cancer, but thankfully he'd beaten it and was doing great.

And then... she didn't write me back. She ghosted me. Rude! At first I assumed she'd gotten busy. It's a restaurant. People need ketchup. Things happen. Then I noticed they were still advertising that they were hiring. So I sent another email. Very pleasant. Very normal. Very much Hello, fellow reasonable adult, perhaps my previous email wandered into cyberspace. Were they still hiring? Had the positions been filled? Nothing. Ghosted twice. Rude! Rude! At my age, I didn't expect to be ghosted by a restaurant. I thought I had aged out of this sort of thing along with tube tops and waiting three days for a man to call.

Then, because I happen to be on the restaurant's customer email list, an announcement arrived in my inbox. They were hiring! Well, apparently they just weren't hiring me. The email went on to talk about how they hire high-school students and give young people their first work experience. And that's when something clicked. I'd been going to this restaurant for years. I'd noticed that the staff was young, but I'd never really thought about it. The owner works there, along with his sister and her husband. Other than those three adults, everyone I've ever seen working there has been a kid. It never bothered me. Why would it? Teenagers need jobs. Somebody has to teach them how to carry six glasses without requiring an insurance adjuster.

But suddenly I wondered. Had I enthusiastically aged myself right out of a job interview? I don't know. Maybe my age had absolutely nothing to do with it. Maybe both of my emails were accidentally swallowed by the same unusually selective spam filter. Maybe there was another perfectly reasonable explanation. But the timing was certainly interesting. And standing there, freshly returned from weeks in the South, reading yet another announcement that this restaurant was hiring, I felt my optimism deflate just a little. Welcome back to Pennsylvania.

The bay isn't the only thing I miss about Fairhope. I missed being welcomed. Not in some grand way. Nobody in Alabama was waiting at the city limits with a sash and a fruit basket. It was tiny things. "Welcome in!" "Morning!" "How are you today?" A wave. A cashier who talked to you. A stranger who acted as though noticing another human being wasn't an unreasonable demand on her afternoon. Those things seem ridiculously small until you spend several weeks receiving them all day long. Then you go somewhere they happen less frequently and realize you've been living on tiny doses of human connection without even knowing it. Three seconds here. Five seconds there. Little droplets of belonging.

We spend an enormous amount of time deciding where to live based on property taxes, home prices, school districts, commute times and whether there's a Costco within twenty minutes. We discuss climate in terms of average rainfall and January temperatures. But I'm beginning to think places have another kind of climate. An emotional one. Do people look at each other? Do strangers talk? Does someone hold the door? Does the cashier chat with you? Does a person riding a bicycle bother saying good morning to a woman who can't even see her? Does ordinary life feel warm? I've always believed belonging is one of our basic human drives. What I hadn't realized was how much belonging can be delivered in three-second increments.

I still live in Pennsylvania. For now. And I suppose I have two choices. I can spend my time complaining that people here don't say good morning enough, which would make me delightful company, or I can start saying it myself. So I will. I'll say good morning. I'll compliment somebody's flowers. I'll talk to the cashier. I'll wave at strangers. Some Pennsylvanian may eventually report me to the township. That's a risk I'm willing to take. Because maybe I brought something home from Alabama besides photographs, an alarming credit-card bill and an unhealthy obsession with Fairhope real estate. Maybe I learned that until I can live in the kind of place I want to live, I can at least be the kind of person I loved encountering there. So tomorrow morning, I'll go for a walk. If I pass you, don't panic. I'm probably just going to say good morning.