Home Is Where My People Are: The Roads That Lead Us to Where We Belong

by Sophie Hudson

  That sounds like Debbie Downer, doesn’t it? I don’t really mean it that way. Because listen—I love a good wedding. And I loved seeing my friends fall in love. And I loved getting to be a bridesmaid and participating in the wedding-related fun.

  But inevitably, when the last of the rice or the birdseed or the rose petals had been thrown and I’d changed from my bridesmaid’s dress and heels into sweats and Birkenstocks, I’d spend most of my drive back to wherever home happened to be at the time feeling like I didn’t know what to make of my early twenties since they didn’t look anything like what the Brat Pack movies of my high school days had trained me to expect.

  I thought I could trust you, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore.

  HOWEVER COMMA YOU LIED TO ME.

  Because here’s what I’d expected: a very grown-up life. I thought I’d drink fancy wine and maybe live in a historical townhome with an interior brick wall and a claw-foot tub in the bath. I pictured glowing success at a job that totally energized me and provided me with a deep reservoir of disposable income. I figured that surely—SURELY—I would have ironed out all the wrinkles in my faith. And most of all, I imagined that no matter where I lived, my closest friends from college would be right there with me, more than likely sporting some long, equestrian-print skirts and Adrienne Vittadini sweaters as we wrapped up our days at a really nice restaurant like Olive Garden or TGI Fridays.

  But, well, no.

  So go ahead and make some wavy Wayne’s World fingers. Sit back and relax. We’re about to have ourselves a flashback.

  The summer before my senior year at State, Elise and Paul got married. They did this because (1) they wanted to commit their lives to each other in a Christ-centered union, and (2) their hormones would not permit them to stay single any longer. They’d dated for three years, and since Paul had graduated at the end of our sophomore year, Elise took every summer school course in the free world (slight exaggeration) and finished her degree two semesters early. I have no idea how she managed to do this considering that she had a very lively social life, a job in the College of Engineering, and a time-consuming hobby as our personal etiquette consultant.

  Okay. She wasn’t really an etiquette consultant. But sister-friend knew her Emily Post backward and forward, and woe be unto anyone who decided to wear a hat after sundown (“You’re protecting your face from what, exactly? The rays of the moon?”) or don some white shoes after Labor Day (“WHITE BELOW THE BELT! We’ve got some WHITE BELOW THE BELT!”). I think all my friends would agree that it made sense for Elise to be the first one to get married; she had mama-ed all of us within an inch of our lives since our freshman year, and you only had to look at her and Paul when they were together to know that they were meant to be.

  So August of my senior year, Elise and Paul had themselves a wedding. I think there were fourteen or fifteen bridesmaids, and we wore dresses that honest-to-goodness defy my fortysomething brain in terms of offering a description. I can only tell you to picture the busiest floral print you’ve ever seen in your life, place said floral print against a navy-blue background, and then wrap eighteen yards of that fabric around your body.

  Then find yourself four more yards of fabric and wrap that around your shoulders.

  The end.

  We didn’t so much wear those dresses as we were enveloped within them.

  At the time, though, we thought those dresses were gorgeous. In fact, we thought everything about Elise’s wedding was gorgeous.

  (Hold on.)

  (I cannot say that with a clear conscience.)

  (Because I most definitely did not think that Elise’s bachelorette party was gorgeous. It was fun, but it wasn’t gorgeous.)

  (Go ahead and make those Wayne’s World fingers again.)

  (It’s time for a flashback within the flashback.)

  (Fancy.)

  Honestly, I don’t know who in the world decided that we should go to New Orleans for Elise’s bachelorette party. It was in New Orleans in July—and as far as I’m concerned, those two things should have nothing to do with each other. Certainly I understand that New Orleans has a reputation for great food and great music and a certain degree of, um, mirth, but none of that negates the fact that July and August are miserable down there. The humidity hangs from the sky like damp, musty sheets on an endless clothesline, and you can almost see the steam that hovers all along the riverbank reach out and attach itself to people as they weave their way through the French Quarter.

  This sort of environment does not necessarily make me feel very festive.

  But for Elise, I tried to be a good sport. I wanted to be a good sport. I plastered a smile on my face when we were getting ready to leave her parents’ house for the drive to New Orleans, and I strategically picked a seat in the car that would provide me with optimal AC access.

  I may have been young, but I was no fool when it came to proper summertime cooling techniques in the Deep South.

  We reached the outskirts of New Orleans in a little over an hour, and I only had to look at the way the sun was hitting Lake Pontchartrain to know that it wasn’t just hot—it was HOT. The water looked thick and still—like you’d need a scoop to put it in a bucket—and I started to dread all the walking we’d be doing that afternoon and night. Yes, I loved Elise like a sister, but New Orleans in July was going to call for a level of selfless sacrifice and surrender that I simply could not achieve in my own strength.

  This was when I began to silently petition the Lord with a zeal I had not known since my high school days.

  Dear Heavenly Father,

  I realize I have been a little distant lately, what with all my questioning and stubbornness and insistence that You should really consider doing things my way. Forgive me for all that, Lord, and help me to trust You more.

  Now. With all that out of the way, I really need to talk to You about this New Orleans in July business.

  Lord, I love my sweet friend Elise. I’d do anything for her. I’d wash her clothes, I’d clean out her car, I’d write a seventeen-page term paper for her on the topic of her choosing. But, sweet Jesus, I do believe that this particular travel assignment is beyond me. Because, Lord, it is hot. It is humid. I am sweating through my clothes even as I offer up this humble prayer of desperation right here on the Twin Span Bridge. This level of perspiration DOES NOT BODE WELL, Lord, as I am currently completely inactive inside an air-conditioned vehicle.

  Ohhhhh, heavenly Father, would you bind this heat? Would you consider providing a thunderstorm that might usher in a hint of a cool breeze? It doesn’t even have to qualify as “wind.” Just some movement in the trees, Lord. Yes, Lord. MOVE, Holy Spirit. Breathe on us. But not hot air, Lord. Breathe some cool air. Please. Sir. Lord. Jesus. Some cool, refreshing air. Just like, you know, you do in the mountains. We’d be oh so grateful.

  In Jesus’ name.

  Now I know full well that the Lord heard my prayer, but in His sovereignty (I am using churchy language to hopefully conceal my lingering bitterness about the state of the weather that weekend), He opted to answer it differently from what I’d requested (continuing with the churchy language option). In fact, when we pulled up to our hotel, the air was so thick with humidity that the car windows fogged, and I braced myself for the wall-o-steam as I savored the car’s last bit of air-conditioning and cracked open the door.

  OH, MY SWEET FANCY MOSES.

  All I could think of was a song I used to hear on Hee Haw when I was a little girl:

  Gloom, despair, and agony on me

  Deep, dark depression, excessive misery . . .

  Not that I was being melodramatic or anything.

  Our hotel rested under the shadow of the I-10 overpass on Canal Street, and I couldn’t shake the thought that our parents would be horrified to know that we were spending the night at the intersection of Murder and Danger. After I grabbed my overnight bag from Elise’s trunk, I side-eyed my way to the front door of the hotel, my mama’s voice echoing in my head every step of the
way: “Sophie, I just don’t think I feel very good about this.” In retrospect, I know we were probably at a solid seven on a safety scale of one to ten, but I think the heat was multiplying my paranoia and interfering with my ability to reason.

  Clearly I was a real ray of sunshine that afternoon—you have probably picked up on that. But since I wanted to seize the day and savor the moment, I tried to think of ways to make it better. I remembered that when I was a little girl and would get ill as a hornet about the heat, Mama always used to tell me to go in the bathroom and run cold water over my wrists. I thought about trying that trick once we settled in our rooms, but I figured it would be like trying to put out a fire with a water gun.

  After Elise passed out room keys, we rode the elevator up to the tenth floor. Since there were eight of us on our NOLA excursion, we’d hatched a plan to split the cost of two hotel rooms in order to keep the cost affordable. To our surprise, however, we unlocked our rooms and found that they came complete with two twin beds—not the two double beds we were expecting. That meant we were going to have to either pay for two more rooms or sleep two to a twin bed.

  We decided to go with the second option because, well, FLAT BROKE.

  Marion and I shrugged our shoulders and threw our stuff on the same twin bed before I checked the mirror to see if I looked even remotely presentable for our night on the town. The short answer to that question was no. No, I did not, but since my hair and makeup didn’t stand a chance against the humidity, I decided that I was as good as I was gonna get. My hair had frizzed into a modified version of Roseanne Rosannadanna’s bob, but thanks to our efficient window unit, my shirt was no longer sticking to my back.

  Progress!

  Bring on the night on the town!

  The insincere enthusiasm was in full force!

  However, despite the heat, the humidity, and the uniquely noxious smell that is New Orleans in the summertime (I’m guessing I will not be asked to serve on a NOLA tourism committee at any point in the near or not-so-near future. I have made my peace with that; however, should they ever decide to do a campaign about traveling to New Orleans in the dead of winter, I can support that endeavor with my whole heart), we had the best time that night. We laughed our way down Canal Street, ate dinner at the Riverwalk, walked around in the French Quarter, sat and listened to some jazz music, and practically earned gold medals in the People-Watching Olympics of 1990.

  When we finally started walking from the French Quarter to our hotel, it was technically early the next morning. Our late-night stroll through the Crescent City was at odds with the safety-first aspect of my personality, but I took comfort in the fact that I was sober as a judge and fully capable of screaming loudly for the authorities in the event of unforeseen danger.

  And seriously, everybody else was just as clearheaded as I was. The point of our trip to New Orleans wasn’t any sort of crazy debauchery; we just wanted to be together for a girls’ night one last time before Elise became an old married woman. We recapped different stories from our night as we crossed streets with funny-sounding names—Toulouse, Conti, Bienville—and we broke into a light jog when we reached an abandoned parking lot that looked like the place where the word sketchy was coined. I hadn’t necessarily counted on having to exercise, but I picked up the pace and took another opportunity to remind everybody that I’D NEVER EXPERIENCED HOTTER WEATHER IN MY LIFE.

  I am nothing if not consistent in my feelings about the heat.

  Once the hotel was in sight, we slowed down. One of Tracey’s shoes had broken, so she hopped on Elise’s back as we approached Canal, and I deliberately fell behind the pack and watched the other girls cross the street. Yes, I was hot (did I mention that?), but I was also awash in sentimentality (you can count on ole English major here to get all tenderhearted and reflective at the most inopportune times). I couldn’t have pinpointed the moment when it happened, but during our time at State, the hearts of those girls had become so inextricably connected to mine that it was hard to know where one stopped and the next one began. We weren’t unhealthy or codependent; heaven knows we tended to be straight shooters and quick to share our opinions. But we knew each other’s hang-ups and struggles, and there was no enabling—oh, no ma’am. Even now I can hear Elise saying, “I get that you have some questions about the faith stuff, but at some point you’ve got to stop worrying about the parts you don’t understand and just hop back on the dadgum train. ALL ABOARD, sister—the next stop is the CHURCH HOUSE, and it’ll do you some good to pay a visit.”

  The Lord is mighty sweet to give us people who have no interest in attending our personal pity parties, you know?

  It was equally as comforting that we knew the little stuff about each other too: who liked to twist her hair into loops when she was in deep thought, who had a pinky finger that didn’t necessarily like to cooperate with all the other fingers, who put on her makeup like she was going to win a prize for finishing first, who memorized the previous year’s Top 10 Miss Mississippi contestants’ talents and could perform them on demand, who pointed the toes on her right foot when she was trying to decide what to wear in the mornings.

  In so many ways, we were the first family we had ever gotten to choose. And now that Elise was getting married, it felt like the beginning of the end of an era.

  In my humble opinion, that era was flying by way too fast.

  I caught up with the other girls as they walked into the hotel lobby, and together—a bride and her tired, merry band of bridesmaids—we made our way to the elevator. We yawned and stretched and rested our heads on one another’s shoulders, and I don’t think any of us could shake the awareness that all we had waiting for us upstairs was half a twin bed. The elevator was obviously in no hurry to transport us to our cramped sleeping arrangements; we must have waited ten minutes for those doors to open.

  When the elevator finally arrived, we—along with a few folks who had been standing behind us—shuffled our way inside and crammed ourselves shoulder to shoulder so we could fit. Elise, who was standing by the elevator panel, diligently looked from person to person and asked for his or her floor number. She was about to question a man who was standing in the center of the elevator when she paused for a second—and then a huge grin spread across her face. I turned to see what had caught her attention.

  The man looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place his face for anything. He was wearing a tracksuit and more gold jewelry than I’d ever seen in one place, and I was just starting to hone in on his most noticeable piece of jewelry when Elise spoke up. Her smile let me know that she knew exactly who he was.

  “Hey!” she said. “Why do you wear that big ole clock on a chain around your neck?”

  The man’s shoulders started to shake from laughter, and before he could answer, Elise said, “What floor, baby? You and that clock probably need to get on home.”

  His smile seemed to spread from one side of the elevator to the other, and his gold teeth glistened under the lights.

  That’s when it dawned on me: Elise had just made friends with Flavor Flav. On an elevator. At two o’clock in the morning.

  Ladies and gentlemen, that right there is New Orleans in a nutshell.

  Since being part of a wedding celebration was somewhat new to our group of college friends, Elise and Paul’s wedding weekend was extra special. It seemed mighty grown-up to stay in a hotel, go to the country club for a rehearsal dinner, nibble on dainty chicken salad sandwiches at the bridesmaids’ luncheon, and gather in the church foyer for prewedding pictures with Elise. We’d spent the better part of three years living next to each other, crying on each other’s shoulders, getting to know each other’s families, and cementing our friendships over concerts and football games and late nights and fried chicken.

  But then we blinked—and there was an actual bride among us.

  The wedding was in the sanctuary of First Baptist Church, and between Elise’s south Mississippi folks and Paul’s people from the Mississippi Delta, you
couldn’t have squeezed two pennies onto any of the pews. That place was packed.

  I didn’t expect to be nervous as I walked down the aisle holding my arm bouquet of alstroemeria lilies, but I was surprisingly shaky and quivery and just the tiniest bit weepy. One look at Paul’s face let me know that he was going to be an emotional wreck by the time Elise’s sister, Christy—the maid of honor—walked down the aisle, so I took my place on the far-right side of the sanctuary, made sure my flowers were at the precise angle the wedding director had specified the day before, and waited for Elise to make her entrance.

  To be honest, it wasn’t a quick process. Between the bridesmaids, the flower girls, the groomsmen, and the clergy, there were about forty of us at the front of the church. There have been Mardi Gras parades with smaller processionals.

  Finally, though, the back doors of the sanctuary opened, and Elise, holding tightly to her daddy’s arm, walked down the aisle. Paul’s chin quivered so much that I wondered for a split second if he might break it, and thanks to that funny way the brain tends to work at random moments, I ran through a four-second list of hypothetical questions: Can a chin actually break? Would that require a cast? What if it needed a sling? Would an injured chin hurt every time it was about to rain?

  You can always count on me to hone in on the most important details.

  Once Elise took her place in front of her groom and the pastor, however, I was dialed in. And twenty minutes later, she and Paul were husband and wife. Pledged, promised, vowed, and sealed with a kiss.