Homecoming

Most people seem to get seasonal depression in the winter. The sun stops shining and weeks of dreary, rainy, cold grey dominate all parts of life. Sometimes it snows, but mostly it doesn’t. It’s just cold. Slushy, dirty ice water gathers on the side of the road and cars get covered in white, dusty salt. I’m weird, I guess. I love the winter. I don’t mind the cold. I don’t mind the grey. My worst seasonal depression happens in fall, when I miss home the most. I struggle with myself in the fall. I get wanderlust. I make grand life plans (life plans that I rarely keep). I talk about moving home. Growing up I loved the fall. I loved the way the oak trees that surrounded my house would drop their thick, fat acorns on the cracked stone driveway. The leaves would slowly turn from summer’s fresh green to brilliant shades of red, yellow, and orange. Our local football team would begin their season and my friends and I would spend our evenings in the crisp, fall, mountain air cheering for the home team. I’m not even that huge of a football fan these days, but high school football was a permanent feature of my late adolescence. We loved it. Our lives revolved around it. There was a palpable energy in those stands and a real community in my town that seemed to congregate on Friday nights. Everyone gathered there together. Like the biggest kitchen table you’ve ever seen.

I remember when it changed. When I moved away and I started resenting those days—feeling as though I’d come from the most backward, archaic town in the South. I moved to this small college in Baltimore and met people who, for the most part, came from glamorous northeastern cities and towns with progressive city councils and private school educations. They never had prayer in public school. They’d never heard people use racist slurs. I was in awe of this progression; it was my very own domestic culture shock. As I struggled with who I used to be, and more importantly who I was becoming, I said things I didn’t mean about where I was from. I told stories I shouldn’t have. I shared secrets about my small, beautiful, mountain town that only those of us lucky enough to have grown up there should be allowed to know—things that you just can’t understand unless you’ve been there. Unless you’ve seen it. I guess this is my own cathartic confession: guilt I’ve been holding onto for years. As I’ve gotten older, and struggled for that sense of home in my life that I always had growing up, I’ve started to recognize just how much that small town taught me about how to behave in this world. I feel horrible that I haven’t always loved where I’m from—like I’ve committed the ultimate betrayal to this place that now means so much to me.

Before my own grandmother passed a few weeks ago, my dearest childhood friend, Maggie, grieved for her own grandmother. I went home. This is what you do when you’re from where I’m from. You go home. You sit with people. You kiss cheeks and squeeze hands. You laugh. You cry. You eat. Maggie’s grandmother was a wonderful woman. Her funeral was such an incredible testimony to her life—nothing at all like the quiet, simple service we held for my own grandmother this last weekend. The small Baptist church filled with people who had in some way been involved in her life. This is also what you do when you’re from where I’m from. You go to funerals for people you barely know—because you know that it means a lot to the people who are still alive. The people who are grieving. The definition of family gets wobbly and almost anyone counts. In the middle of the service, a group of six or seven cousins got up and sang old-fashioned mountain music. They sang her favorite hymns. It was so moving I couldn’t help but cry. This thing, this simple, old-fashioned funeral, was all about home. This is what it means to be from a place that is simple and full of grace. This is what it feels like to be around people who believe in the power of prayer and faith. This is what it looks like when family lines are large and undefined; where songs get sung around out-of-tune family pianos. Where stories get shared and stretched over the dinner table. Where simple things are still simple things. This funeral reminded me about what it means to be from this place—how lucky I am. How blessed.

Coming over the mountain into the valley I've called home for my whole life, I always sigh with a deep breath. My cell phone coverage breaks. The radio crackles. I roll all the windows down, hoping I’ll catch a whiff of that unruly honeysuckle bush on the side of the road. I turn on something like Gillian Welch’s Revival and sing all the words as loud as I can sing them. Something in my heart clicks into place. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve done this over the last twenty-six years. Every time I come home I hold my breath for this part. It’s like when you watch your favorite movie and there is a part you love so much that you can hardly stand to watch it; it feels like you’re too lucky to have that feeling on demand. There is this bend in the road where you start to go back down the mountain and suddenly all you see is this incredible panoramic mountain scene. It’s like my guilty pleasure. Within minutes you’re back in town. It’s done in an instant. But I love it. It means I’m home. And I hate that for so many years I couldn’t see it. I couldn't see anything but what I wanted to see. I only saw the red on the political map. I only saw the pick-up trucks and the trailers and the junk on front porches. I couldn’t see the things that mattered—the real beauty of this place. Not yet, atleast.

There is a distinct feeling I get when I get to a place I call home. There is a settled contentment in the pit of my belly. My body relaxes, my shoulders let loose, and my hips get low and wide. I feel grounded. I feel safe. I feel happy. I can take a deep breath and feel contentment as my lungs fill with air and release, slowly, with satisfaction. Over the years this place called home has become as undefined and wobbly of a word as family at a Baptist Church funeral. I’ve found home is in a lot of places. I’ve fallen in love with people and ideas all around the world. But nothing beats that mountain view. Nothing can compete with what my childhood taught me life was all about. Annie Dillard writes a lot of essays about nature. I’ve always connected to her work. She writes in A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: “Mountains are giant, restful, absorbent. You can heave your spirit into a mountain and the mountain will keep it, folded, and not throw it back as some creeks will. The creeks are the world with all its stimulus and beauty; I live there. But the mountains are home.” This quote has somehow captured all that I feel about where I grew up.

I’ve moved to the creek. My life is complicated and messy and absurd. There is so much stuff in my life. But the mountains are home. They are quiet, and giant, and unshaken by my choices. In the chaos of the last few weeks, I’ve been reminded about what it means to have family. What it means to have faith. What it means to go home. In Ghana, people refer to this symbol Sankofa, a bird resting his head on his back, which symbolizes returning to one’s roots. Every now and then I need to go home. I need to return to my roots.

Today the weather turned cold. The leaves have already begun to fall. They hardly changed color this year and most certainly didn’t shine in brilliant shades of red and yellow. Autumn doesn’t happen here the way it happens in the mountains. I got sad. I missed the mountains. I wanted so desperately to be home. I had to push this desire to the side, recognizing my responsibility to my life in the creek, and simply dreamt about coming over that crest. I pretended I could see the mountains and the thousands of shades of orange the landscape becomes this time of year. I had to be satisfied with what I had in my memory. But deep in my heart, in the tiniest, most secret folds, I knew the truth about where I really wanted to be. And perhaps for now, that’s good enough.