It’s just another day in Enterprise

My wife and I arrived here on a 70-degree Sunday in the late afternoon. We had listened to two albums as we made our way down sleepy I-10 fighting to stay awake. We had been preparing for this moment for over a year, the moment when our new life together would “really” start. Prior to now we had been displaced, living like nomads, six months in Jacksonville, Fla., and six in Gainesville, Fla., anticipating the day we would finally be settled.

It has been four weeks since we’ve come to rest here in Enterprise. It’s the place my wife was raised, but a foreign land to me, a Floridian all my life. My wife knows this place but for me, I wondered how I’d fit in.

I don’t know if it was the first trip to Cutt’s Restaurant or the visit to Annie’s, but I’ve gained a few pounds exploring this unfamiliar place. I’ve encountered a few steak and potato dinners and have had trouble resisting the fried chicken lunches. A few days in and this place had already won my stomach over. Life is more than food, though.

Here the streets are flooded with pick-up trucks while back in Florida I only knew one or two people who owned one. My friend Mike picks me up in his champagne Ford F-150. He loves how reliable it is, how long it’s lasted. 

He shifts through the gears workmanly as we make our way down a sandy dirt road. We pull up to a small wooden workshop out where there’s no cell phone signal. We exit the vehicle and walk into the shop, dust rising from our feet. There are 12 men standing around a black forge watching the instructor give step-by-step instructions on how to create a set of steel tongs. The instructor hammers a rod of red-hot steel, squaring it. Fascination strikes me as I watch the metal being bent.

Later in the week Mike takes me to the back of his house where he raises chickens. They cluck and strut as we walk his yard admiring the garden. We feed the chickens then take a trip down the road to a friend’s house to drop off some fertile eggs. When we arrive we’re shown a box of newly hatched chicks that cuddle in a corner, warming themselves. We walk around the property to the chicken coops. We watch his friend go inside a coop, and sit in a chair as the chickens fly on to his lap and shoulders flocking to him. They’re his pets. It’s just another day in Enterprise.

Most days, as I wipe the sleep from my eyes and totter into the hallway, my mother-in-law greets me cheerfully saying, “Good morning Chandler, did you have a good night?” I’m not used to the question and often pause to think, “How was my night?” I continue thinking,  “I slept, I dreamed… Was that a good night? I woke up! So, it was a good night!” I finally conclude before answering, “Yes, it was a good night.” “Good!” she says with a radiant smile as I, gradually coming out of my morning stupor, return a smile.

Unexpectedly, I’ve experienced more variety of life in four weeks in Enterprise than in four months in Florida. I’ve been wowed by the hospitality and rich sense of kinship that permeates this area. 

In 2008, I lost my mother and with her my anchor, the essence of “where I came from.” It’s neat how God works, though. Marrying my beautiful wife and moving here, I’ve come to find that I’ve been adopted, into a new community, a new family, a new place… our new home. As my wife surprises me with breakfast here at work, I smile and think, “I could get used to being from here.”

 

Chandler Collins is a staff writer for The Southeast Sun and Daleville Sun-Courier. The opinions of this writer are his own and not the opinion of the paper. He can be reached at (334) 393-2969 or by email at [email protected].