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I blew it.
I misplaced the charger for my camera. I now have 40+ wonderful pictures of Nashville, 40+ pictures that explain the absolute weirdness of this alien place, which I cannot show you. But oh, the pictures I would post!
Nashville abounds with vintage neon signs. Car dealerships, liquor stores, laundromats and honky-tonks advertise their wares with humming tubes and blinking lights. Movie theaters glow technicolor. Fireworks climb a pole and explode. A jumping trout catches a fly in his mouth.
Cowboy boots, everywhere you look. Cowboy boot shops are a distinctly Nashville tourist trap. As our landlord, a lifelong Nashvillian, drawled: “Nobody from Nashville wears cowboy boots.” But the myth persists and boot shops appear in clusters downtown like mushrooms after rain.
The insects here are enormous and exotic to those of us accustomed to black ants and houseflies. Flying cockroaches crash headfirst into walls and mill about on the sidewalks at night. Wooly aphids resembling mobile knots of dryer lint accumulate on decks and bare arms. Bees reach unimagined dimensions. Coworkers warn me about fire ants and invasive millipedes, while Matt is perpetually covered with mosquito bites.
I have found the people here to be very kind, slow-moving and sweet. They advise us on where to go for a meat and three, a concept we roughly understand. They tell us where tornadoes have hit, and how many more days of rain are coming. They sometimes tell us things we don’t understand, because we have trouble with the accent. Endings disappear and pins turn into pens. This is Southern magic.
Someday I will find my charger, and show you all this and more.
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