The Itch

Sometimes I wonder when the itch began. It might have begun the first time my Uncle sent me a chocolate egg from a faraway place for my birthday. I can still remember how exciting it was each year to get another package from across the sea. I would curiously open the tiny treasures wrapped up inside a brown cardboard box, hoping that it would be a chocolate Kinder-egg from Germany! The outside of the egg was made of milk chocolate and the inside of the egg was made of white chocolate. And if you opened it just right it would split down the middle in a perfect line to reveal the secret prize hidden inside the hollow center of the egg. Sometimes it would be an action figure of one sort or another, other times it would be a car or a train. But my favorites were the puzzles. A puzzle prize meant that you didn’t just get one thing out of your egg, but many! The fun never seemed to end as I would meticulously attempt to assemble all the tiny pieces into some new unique gadget. I suppose my little collection of Kinder-egg toys began to form a connection to the outside world in my mind; the world of the unknown, the adventurous, and exciting.

It is possible though, that the itch began much earlier. I can remember flipping through the dusty pages of old National Geographic magazines in our garage as a child. I used to tear out the fold-up posters of jungles, or cities, or wild animals and pin them on the walls in my room. By the time I was in 6th grade there was hardly any space to fit the new posters of Luke Perry or Jonathan Brandis on my wall!

But if that didn’t start the itch, it certainly set in when my Mom and Dad flew away on a trip to Europe to visit my Uncle. I still remember that day at the airport. I was eleven years old and I was being sent to spend 3 weeks of my summer in Aiken with my grandparents, and heaven forbid, with my little sister! Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely loved those summer weeks when I got to be at Grandmamma and Granddaddy’s house. Those weeks would be full of digging in the garden with Granddaddy, catching lightning bugs in a jar at night, making my Grandmother’s coffee in the morning, watching nickelodeon in the afternoon while snapping a big pan of green beans on the couch, or picking purple Four O’clock’s and stringing them on a piece of straw from the broomstick to make a necklace. Those hot summer days at Grandmama’s house will always have a special and sacred place in my memory. But I can still remember that day in the airport, watching my parents’ plane speed down the runway, lift into the air and grow smaller and smaller as it flew further and further away. I can still remember the overwhelming agony of knowing that I was going to be missing the summer of a lifetime; a summer of travel and adventure.

Perhaps moments like these were the small stepping stones that led me here. Some days I still wake up and pinch myself because it seems so unreal that I live in Europe. No adventure is too outlandish for my thinking anymore it seems. Want to drive to Italy? No problem! How about a week in Portugal? Stop over in Spain? I’ve now got friends in India, Australia, South Africa and Brazil, just to name a few. It’s incredible really, when you think about it. Who would have thought that a simple girl from a small town in South Carolina would end up where I am?

And yet, there are days, like today, when I can’t help but wonder why I find myself longing for a place that I spent so many years yearning to leave. Not too long ago I felt as though I had found a new home here in Europe; a community, a family, a new way of life. I felt as though it really fit. Now, I’ve come to another crossroad in my life, a crossroad where I have to decide which direction to go next. I suppose it is this very thing that has caused me to reflect on the life journey that has brought me here thus far. So I bought a ticket. A ticket that will fly me far, far away to a place my heart knows as home. I can already smell the thick fragrance of Tea Olive flowers wafting through the hot sticky air of South Carolina…and I’m itching for a new adventure! Sometimes I think I was born with the itch.