Livin’ On the Line

Livin’ On the Line

Dear Diary …

I can see it now … some day … they will make a movie about my life.

And it’ll start by showing a home … in a field.

And as the wind gently rustles the branches of the trees … the narrator will come on and say …

“All my life … we lived on the line. And even if we moved … Momma would pack up all our things … and we would set up shop in a new town. And still … we’d be on the line.”

And yes … first and foremost … Matthew McConaughey narrates the story of my life.

Second … it’s true … no matter where I live … I live on “the line.” And the line I’m talking about is the one that happens any time there’s a snow storm, and there’s some kind of line between getting nothing but a bunch of awesome snow, and instead getting some hodgepodge of horrible of snow, sleet, and freezing rain. No matter where I live … that’s where I live … the line.

Grew up in New England … I mean you’d think … “OK well it’s all cold and Northern up there … nobody lives on the line.” Nope! We were juuuuust close enough to the ocean that we always got hosed by some stupid pocket of warm air. Every other town would have the day off to make snowmen and go sledding, meanwhile we were at school in Social Studies.

Social Studies. Can I just point out that’s the one class that … looking back … I have no idea what it even was? I mean no offense to social studies, but I remember the stuff they taught us in things like math or science, but I couldn’t tell you a single topic that was covered on a social studies quiz from back in the day.

Anyway … point is … I lived on the line. Then I moved to Philadelphia. And while it was again near the ocean, we somehow managed to live in this one weird pocket of a town that was REALLY affected by the ocean way more than any of the other towns. And let’s not forget, that if a storm actually managed to impact the coast line more? Yeah we didn’t qualify for that one either because we weren’t quite ocean-y enough.

So then I move to southwest Virginia. And you know what we don’t have? The ocean!

So finally … I figure … for the first time in my life … I don’t live on the line anymore. And yet … what happens every time there’s a storm? Some sort of mythical mountainous line of the wizardry of the “I-81 Corridor” … and now I’m over here getting pelted with little icy nuggets of sleet while the other side of the line looks like Vail, Colorado or something.

Look … I get it … ultimately it ain’t that big a deal, and sometimes it’s probably beneficial to live on the line … but how is it that no matter where I go … no matter what I do … The Line follows me?

[Narrator voice] “Come to find out we were drawn to the line, and we just had to accept our fate. The fate that we were, in fact, Line People.

Till next time Diary … I say … Alright, Alright, Alright