[Inspired by "The Judgment of Memory" by Joseph Bottum in March's First Things.]
I'm no longer homesick for home, but in some way that is a loss. It used to be a very deep and real part of me, such that I would feel like I was really one with the land, mountains, and trees. I would wake, aching with longing for those fields edged with snowy pines, only to be greeted by the eternal southern summer which had been thrust upon me by my own choice.
Perhaps my continual revisiting of home in stories is a longing for a place and knowing that I do not have it. The home of my childhood was very different from the home of my early adulthood, the one light, the other dark. But in both I felt a deep resonance between myself and my physical surroundings. Each turn brought me to a granite cliff remembered from early childhood, to the hill where the car ran out of gas on the way to the hospital for my mother to give birth to my older brother, or the apartment where a truck's windshield was shot out the week before we moved in. I loved them because I knew them, and whether or not the situation was primarily good or bad fell by the wayside.
And yet, since leaving I've found that I really love places that used to be the essence of foreign. My feeling for New York City was once best expressed by O'Connor's Judgment Day (oh, for home's early morning slant of light!) But now that I've visited it, I find that I really love it—though I can't quite believe that it likes me. Like Jed Tewksbury in A Place to Come to, I want to be very clear about the situation: I am a redneck gawking at the big city, even if that's not really the case. And so I find myself choosing stories which prove that point, like the neighbor who wore a new pair of jeans for his daughter's wedding rather than going down to Riverfront Park for Handel's Fireworks Concert each summer with my dad.
What I am looking for in the past is my identity in the present: where did I come from and where am I now? And this because I hope that the future holds a place to come to.
