Insight

While the story ends near here — a short trek through the pines from where I sit — it begins across an ocean and with fading type on a yellowed document.

Child born abroad.

I always thought my birth certificate might as well have declared “Child born with ears that stick out.” The tone is the same.

Abroad, for this particular Army brat, means Stuttgart, Germany, 1975.

The place and time are different for each of us, those of us from nowhere, but abroad suffices for all and has tried, I suppose, over the years to keep each of us from becoming too attached.

Clinging to place and time is a dangerous game for the transient; emotional investment can prove risky. It takes the better part of a military tour of duty to earn trust and to nurture love, and yet only a few minutes to watch it all fade from the backseat of the family van.

Many, many promises are broken when dad gets new orders. I was going to be best friends forever with Jessica. And Temple. And Betina. I've lost touch with them all.

But, you get good at it — saying goodbye. You learn to respect the armed and gated communities where race often blurs and unlikely friendships flourish and where groceries and cigarettes come cheap.

You're fine as long as you don't give your heart away … to person or place.

Since military children are born in random hospitals with help from random doctors — never having a regular pediatrician or nurses we call by first name — the place we are from becomes the place our fathers and mothers are stationed the longest. Sometimes that's only three years.

I'm from a place that does not exist anymore. A place in gauzy memory. A place where traffic still stops for marching soldiers.

It's a place where a little girl sends a tetherball spinning around a freshly painted pole capped with a red-and-white orb. The pole is faded now and the girl is older. The orb, a washed-out pink, dangles in the pines like the moon.

There's a brand-new curvy road that leads to my first house on Fort McClellan. Forgive me, I've not got the heart to utter “McClellan” without “Fort.” My Summerall Terrace home was two stories with a shiny hardwood staircase and a steep back yard once ripe for childish exploration.

On your next trip to Terra Café or the Anniston Youth Sports Complex, look to the left. You'll see the house I lived in when I was 8. I never see much through my tears.

My dad was stationed at Fort McClellan for the first time in 1983. He'd been to the area many times before — as a Military Police officer he'd had many opportunities to visit the MP school for training.

I finished 3rd grade during this duty tour in Mrs. Sansom's class at Fort McClellan Elementary School, which is now Sacred Heart Catholic School. I've walked the school halls a few times as an adult — always after normal school hours when most of the children are gone. The halls seem dark and relatively unchanged in 24 years. I'm told my old classroom isn't third grade anymore, though.

Dad got new orders. The family was headed for the tropics. My time at Fort McClellan had been brief, but almost five years later Fort McClellan, the MP magnet, would call Sgt. Anderson back. This time, for his second permanent tour of duty in Alabama, he'd return with a pre-teen daughter.

After spending more than four years in Hawaii, returning to Alabama didn't feel like paradise to me. But I was almost 13 — and grumpy.

Sometimes paths cross more than once in the military world.

While waiting to move into my second home on Fort McClellan, my family spent a few nights in a guesthouse. The first night, while we prepared for bed, the fire alarm sounded. Sleepy, pajama-clad families, irritable and anxious to begin again, huddled in the night. My third-grade best friend, Jessica, was among us, I discovered.

She'd been in Germany while I'd been in Hawaii.

I braced that night, under starry sky, to give my heart away. It had been only a drill — but a friendship was rekindled.

We were two friends, together again. We entered Jacksonville High School as eighth-graders midway through a semester — the new girls. People assumed we were sisters.

Jessica's second home on Fort McClellan was a few duplexes down from mine on Morton Road, but on the other side of the street. Who knows how many times we walked the path between our houses? I only know that the nights spent together far outnumbered the nights spent alone. And the sidewalk is surely friendship worn still today.

My second house on Morton Road was covered in a mauvey-pink vinyl siding. Only a chain-link fence and McClellan Boulevard separated my backyard from Wal-Mart. I could hear my old dog Buddy's bark from the parking lot.

I visited this house one Saturday afternoon last December.

Construction was going on all around … is going on all around.

My pink house was only bones.

It is only bones.

Every trace of me is gone — crumbled with the walls and carted off in construction dumpsters.

I gripped the steering wheel. Tight. And rested my chin on it. The radio was off, but still I could hear the soundtrack of my formative years as '90s pop songs filled the heavy air all around me.

I remember blinking hard. In the passenger seat beside me, my dad did the same.

As sad and wonderful and weird as the moment was for me, there in front of our gutted house, it must have been harder for him. I know it was.

“Do you want me to hop out and get a piece of it,” I said, almost not loud enough to crack the tender silence and unsure of what I'd actually collect.

“Just … keep on driving,” he whispered.

We continued north up Morton Road and drove to the summit that used to be a baseball diamond. I could smell my brother and his gang of friends. Andy came home many times clay-stained and sweaty after a day of play and we'd cheered for our little brothers and sisters and friends many times from bleachers that are long gone now.

We looked up to the sky almost as if hoping a baseball would fall from it. There's a church on that summit now. It's a beautiful place for a steeple, I guess.

As we drove off, I thought of that pink house on Morton Road and hated myself a little. Dad's recollections were from a different perspective than mine and I cringed at the memories I must have given him — I'd been a teenager in that house, after all. He'd been a good dad … and a drill sergeant. I'd broken his heart more than once under that roof. No amount of military training can prepare a man for a stubborn daughter.

Maybe crumbled walls weren't so bad. Maybe they are hope that time brings progress and that hearts can heal.

But we're never really strong enough, are we, to witness the people and places we love fall to shamble, or wither and gray in front of us.

The tremendous piece of land that once made me feel so secure within its gates doesn't make me feel welcome much these days.

Oh, I enjoy fine meals in Terra Café, sitting in awe of the beautiful structure stripped of its military drop ceiling and cold tile to reveal the beams of glorious Spanish-Colonial architecture. I think of getting my first military ID card in a similar building — a rite of passage for military children better even than getting a driver's license.

I still dream of owning a cottage on Drennan Drive — I actually could now that they are civilian-owned properties. My dad had been non-commissioned and those cottages were once reserved for officers. When I'm out that way, I like to drive Buckner Circle. I fell in love, or as close to it as a 15-year-old girl gets, in the General's Quarters. I don't know who lives there now, but it will always be Michael's house to me.

I'm not a city planner, politician or anything close to that. I've only got memories and sentiment in this fight. I just hope that the folks put in charge of my Fort McClellan will give their hearts to this place — and, in time, maybe I'll learn to call it McClellan, because, though I've fought it, I think it's where I'm from.