Driving through rural Mississippi, I felt my shoulders drop. Suddenly I was smiling. On a dappled road between weedy hedgerows and piney woods and cotton fields and country graveyards and shabby crossroads towns without so much as a blinking yellow light, I was singing along with Tyler Childers and smiling like a fool.
I was home.
I don’t mean literally. I come from Lower Alabama peanut-farming stock, not Mississippi cotton farmers. The first time I ever set foot in Mississippi, I was 22 and on my way to New Mexico, eager to shake the red dirt of home from my sandals as fast as I could manage.
But those small clapboard churches where cars park right on the grass, and those rough farm roads yielding to blacktop, and those blooming, insect-bedazzled margins between fields, and that splintered light pouring down from the pines — they were all telling me I was home. And I was so happy to be home.
“If you suddenly and unexpectedly feel joy,” writes the poet Mary Oliver, “don’t hesitate. Give in to it.”
I believe she’s right — “Joy is not made to be a crumb”— but for a certain kind of Southerner, it’s impossible not to question this particular happiness. This place has caused so much suffering. How could loving it fail to provoke questions? And yet the sight of cotton growing in fields made me happy. For those few hours, even knowing the terrible, blood-soaked history of cotton, I couldn’t help it. Happiness rose in me like an anthem. […]
Drive down a highway in your own homeland, the golden autumn light pouring around you and the golden leaves tumbling in the passing rush of air, and tell me your heart doesn’t fill up with love and longing. Tell me you could keep your heart from filling up with love to the throbbing point of longing. Even a heart entirely broken comes back for more breaking when the source of heartbreak is home. […]
I will keep on loving the place that made me, for I seem to have no choice about that. Because when the muted gold of the pine needles and the extravagant yellow leaves of the elms and the mottled orange leaves of the sugar maples and the shining red leaves of the black gum trees are all falling out of the sky in the passing wind, it always feels exactly like a benediction.
—Margaret Renkl, from “Notes on Going Home” (NY Times, November 20, 2023)
DK Photo @ Cove Island Park @ 6:25 am this morning. More photos from this morning’s glorious walk (in the cold wind chill) here.
I envy her sense of ‘home’, her knowing these roots, these trees, these falling leaves are all part of her history through time and space and place.
I am first generation Canadian. Father was born in Ireland. Mother in India. I was born in Canada but spent 15 of my first 22 years on this planet living in England, France and Germany. When I returned to Canada at age 23, I didn’t have a ‘home’ to return to. I didn’t have a place to call me back. Only a man from Toronto I’d met at university in France and a desire to know what it means to be Canadian.
There are still transitory moments when I feel like a stranger to this land. A land stolen from those who called it home long before the settlers arrived. A land I belong to if only because the passport I carry says I do.
Thank you DK for sharing this piece. Not only is it beautiful, it inspires deep thought and feelings for me about what does ‘home’ mean for me — and that’s always a good thing!
Beautiful Louise. Esp paused on this: “There are still transitory moments when I feel like a stranger to this land. A land stolen from those who called it home long before the settlers arrived. A land I belong to if only because the passport I carry says I do.” Thank you for sharing.
This is beautiful. I have lived almost all of my life in New England. Whenever I leave it, I am always welcomed back with a sense of safety.
It is beautiful. She’s amazing….
I wonder how the early nomadic tribes (of anywhere – North America or Africa) felt about “home.” Maybe they had their favourite places; maybe they called many places home. It would be a completely different mindset to what most of us feel.
Now you have me thinking Anneli! Great insight!
It would be interesting to know, but I don’t think we ever will.
I moved a lot. A lot. Move over Gypsies. Bedouin. Nomads. Squatters. The final word says it all. Benediction.
Yes!
When you feel at home, you know it. 💝
Yes!
The season as a benediction – how. gorgeous is that? Perhaps suggests that home is where the heart swells wiith comfort and familiarity, where one is safe and satisfied and impossible not to recognize…
Yes!
beautiful
I wish I knew what that feels like.
But I trust it feels good.
It does…
“It is the kind of insight that makes you weightless, the knowledge that there is something greater than all love.”
— The Antarctica of Love: A Novel by Sara Stridsberg
a few things make me feel weightless