A Toast to Texas

Story ID:	968
Written by:	Carol J Garriott
Organization:	home/retired
Story type:	Diary/Journal Entry
Location:	Austin Texas USA
Year:	1972
Person:	Carol

"To Texas . . .
Joyous and sparkling,
Evergreen when it rains, enduring in drought,
Timeless, endless in boundaries, exciting,
Home to the adventurous of yesterday and today,
With shrines from the past
And space and spirit for the future.
To Texas.
Everlasting in the hearts of your people!"
Written by the late historian Joe B. Frantz

Back in the days when I lived in Central Texas, someone asked me once why I was so radical about Texas--I wasn't born a Texan and was nearly 40 before moving here. A lot of thinking went into the answer.

My first exposure, if you will, to Texas, came from relatives who lived in Texas and arrived now and then to visit. I was totally enraptured by my girl and boy cousins, who were tall (a few years older than me), tanned (even in winter), and full of stories of their homeland.

Everyone in that family regaled us with tales of Texas, how long it took to drive across it, how it had pine forests in the east, desert and mountains in the west, plains like Kansas in the north, and, wonder of wonders, coastal waters along the south.

And so the dream began: if I lived in Texas, I, too, would be taller, tanned, and could tell those tales.

On visits with my husband to friends in Houston, I experienced the vastness and the mystique firsthand. From the Oklahoma/Texas border to the Coast was farther than from my home in Central Kansas across Oklahoma to that border! The changing topography from plains, through dramatic hill country, past fields of cotton, to coastal grasslands was illuminating.

Now, I loved my home state of Kansas tremendously. I still feel the soul of the endless prairie when I look out across the rolling Flint Hills. Brilliant fall color in my Big Sister’s home of ElDorado, Kansas, brings out the photographer in me. Vacations in other states introduced me to the majesty of the Rocky Mountains, the incredible vistas of Coastal California and Oregon, the forests and waters of the Northwest, the beauty of pines and dogwood in the Southeast.

No place, however, could dim the call of Texas. There was just something that represented freedom, a place to do what you chose to do, be who you chose to be. A lot of it, no doubt, had to do with the increasing need to bid adieu to the marriage, and strike out on my own. But, surely, other states would have worked as well?

Well, along in here I discovered the sea, and how I felt when I was near it. How a Kansas girl came to be such a water spirit, it's hard to say. I think sometime in a previous life I lived an idyllic life on a shore. Walking beside a seawall or along a beach always makes me feel like I've come home.

When I left the Kansas hearth and home in the early 1970s, I looked for a larger town for the better paying job, but didn’t feel brave enough to tackle Dallas or Houston. That took me to Austin, where I already had friends. It was the right place for 25 years.

Out of all the homes I secured for myself across these on-my-own years, my favorite was a unique lake cabin on the North Shore of Lake Travis west of Austin. If I could have moved that little rock-and-tile house to the coast, I would have. Selling it provided the wherewithal to retire and find my place by the sea, so it was left behind.

Those lifelong friends and I had vowed when we retired to get the wagons in a circle as close to "big" water as we could afford. And so we found Seadrift on San Antonio Bay. It’s the right place now.

I didn't get taller. I DID get tanned, even in the winter, and I love to tell stories of Texas.