I became a Charlottean shortly after I learned how to walk. It was preceded by a two-day drive across the country’s flat middle, which was preceded by my mother dropping an armful of groceries in a Walmart parking lot in Omaha, Nebraska. It was punishingly cold. Plastic bags scudded across the asphalt like arctic tumbleweeds, and my mother looked at my brother’s and my ruddy little faces, thought about her lifetime of North Carolina summers, and knew she had to go back. Continue reading