Where is home to you?

Carolina on My Mind

“In my mind I’m goin’ to Carolina

Can’t you just see the sunshine

Can’t you just feel the moonshine

Ain’t it just like a friend of mine

To hit me from behind

Yes, I’m going to Carolina in my mind.”

                                    James Taylor

                                    Carolina in My Mind

            Several times each year, spring and fall specifically, I feel a turning inside me.  I begin leaning north and east; I yearn for mountains and a certain rhythm of speech.  Like a migratory bird, I head out to North Carolina to get my mountain fix.  It is home; it will always be home.  There is something about the music of water over rocks, about mist crawling up the slope of a blue mountain in early morning that calls to me like the voice of an angel. It’s irresistible. I have to go. 

            I’ve always been curious about this connection to place.  I’m quite sure that people all over the world feel it just as strongly as I do.  Watching the people protesting in the streets of Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, I think, “Why don’t they just leave?  Why would they stand in the face of bullets and tanks?”  But then I hear them say, “This is my home. This is my country,” and I know just what they mean.  They want to live in peace in the place where they are rooted.  They would rather die than leave.  There is strength in being where your very cells connect with a land and a culture that can stand against anything, even a tyrant.

            When I was a young woman, I married an Air Force officer and moved to California.  I had never been through desert.  I started crying around Gallup, New Mexico and cried all the way to Sacramento, California.  I may as well have been on the moon.  It was brown and vast and terrifying to my mountain eyes.  One morning I was miserably dragging a basket of dirty clothes to the laundry room in our apartment complex when I ran into a woman twenty years my senior; an old service wife who had seen it all.  I told her how homesick I was.  She informed me, “You better learn to make home wherever you go, or you’ll never have home again.”  I cried some more, but I knew she was right.  I have made home in Texas, California, New York, South Carolina, Florida, Virginia, Tennessee and Alabama, but still…in my mind I’m going to Carolina. 

Where is home for you?  It is your soul that connects you to that place and calls you home.  Listen to your soul. 

           

                                                In all things give thanks,

                                                Jane