The summer is slipping away at a quickening pace. The leaves are beginning to yellow, and handfuls of them are whisked off the trees at every sturdy gust of wind. I'm grateful, knowing there's only two more months of hot weather to be endured. This is an odd summer for me. Things are changing around me. I'm changing, slightly, again. My fixed convictions have become mutable. I can scarcely believe it, but I don't feel utterly devastated at the thought of another year here. That's not to say I want to stay here, for I don't, but if I have no choice about it I'm not going to whine and moan for another 12 months. Maturity? Weariness? I don't know. I just know I can't go around being unhappy all the year long even if I am alienated by women here.
You know, that's really what is the hard thing for me to cope with. No girlfriends. No women I relate to. I like women better than men; I always have. I can't stand being so alone all the time with only a guy to talk to, even if he is my husband and the dearest person in the world to me. I need female companionship desperately, and it's the one thing I've consistently gone without here in Nashville. Typical southern women get on my nerves, though. I know I get on theirs. I try to get by as best I can, enjoying the good things about Nashville like fireflies, and cardinals, and redbud trees in the spring.
Frankly, there are some things about Nashville that still make me shudder, like white people's use of the word "nigger" in casual conversation, and the incredibly bad driving, and catfish on the menu of every restaurant. Okay, not every single restaurant, but darned near. Yuck, eat a bottom-feeder fish? No thanks. I'm afraid I've become a worse driver as a result of living here, rather than exerting a beneficial influence, but at least driving in Boston no longer holds any fears for me. As far as racism, I just quietly ask people to refrain from telling me racist jokes or expressing their racist views around me, but I don't lecture everyone who says they grew up "working as hard as a nigger" on the tobacco farm. It's not my culture, and I'm not going to fight a battle only to lose a war. It does mean I have fewer friends.
Thank goodness for computers, and online diaries, and all the good people who email me with funky, funny things to read and think about. Staying inside during a long, hot summer is no burden at all when there's so much to do in the cool, dark house. I'll just sit here, reading and writing, until the sun heads south again and the cooling autumn winds blow leaves around my door.
