Heart Home

My husband can't stand how I answer this common cocktail party question: Where are you from? I agree with him that I often pause, sorting my thoughts, evaluating whether to offer the short or long version of the answer, only to take a deep breath followed by a fumbling answer, which he finds wholly unsatisfactory. He is perplexed that I can’t simply reply to this run-of-the-mill question. But it is not a simple question for me.

Like so many, I didn't grow up in one home—or one town, or state, or country. I have long had a wistful view of friends whose childhood bedroom is the one they still go home to as adults. That is a foreign concept to me, but not to my nostalgic heart. I have noticed this seemingly simple yet complicated fact since I was a teenager, visiting the homes of friends and realizing that their kitchen silverware drawer had been in the same place their entire lives. What must that feel like? 

While I am sure some people find deep comfort in the familiar, others feel a kind of jittery discomfort, an inner spring that wants to propel them out of the familiar and into the new. My mother, who was raised on the same piece of land her mother was born and raised on, wanted only to get out. The Hell Out. She left her rural southern corner of the earth and never lived there again. But when I would lie in the back bedroom of her childhood home, listening to frogs that were so loud they sounded like they were under my bed and not outside my window, a chorus of crickets and cicadas competing for airtime, I could only think that my mother had lain in the bed one room over as a child and heard the same summer concert. With that thought, my whole body calmed, as though enveloped in a quilt of familiarity. Even then, I felt a comfort deep in my soul that nothing ever changed at my grandparents' house. The furniture was never replaced or moved around, the smells of their country kitchen—like tomato vine and fried chicken—as familiar to me as my own scent. 

So when I am asked, Where are you from, the I-am-not-going-to-deep-dive-with-you answer is to the point: Many places. The long answer that I anticipate no one really wants to hear at a cocktail party is that I was born in the US, but then moved to Canada when I was six years old and was raised in Winnipeg, Manitoba. When I was fourteen, I spent an impressionable year living in southern France while my mother was on a research sabbatical. Then, for a dramatic end to the tale, we moved to the Dallas area for my junior and senior years of high school. My formative years of identity and development through middle and high school were lived in very different cultures and countries—and yes, I know Texas is not a country. But if you have ever lived there, you know that Texans believe it very well ought to be its own country. I never go into this much detail in my answer, but occasionally, when I decide to share the whole story, people inevitably ask, Where do you consider home? If this question catches me in a sentimental mood, I feel a prick of tears evoked by this seemingly harmless inquiry because I don't have a home. Not the kind they are asking about.

In my mid-twenties, ironically living back in North Carolina just an hour and a half away from my grandmother, I sat in the office of a therapist affectionately known as Dr. D. Wet-eyed and heavy with the feeling of being soul-lost, I cried, "I don't even know how to dress, Dr. D.! I dress one way with one group of friends, another way with a different group. My closet looks like a thrift shop; nothing matches! What is wrong with me!? I don't even know my own style!" 

His reply was steady and clarifying, "You lived in four countries over four consecutive years while you were a developing teen; it’s no wonder you don't know what you like. You were so busy trying to fit in every time you moved that you developed great skills at making yourself look and act like everybody else, but you missed out on building your own strong sense of identity. You don't know yourself." 

I cried more. 

I was an adult and utterly lost. I thought this was the time of knowing oneself, not looking in the mirror and having no idea why I was wearing genie pants and twenty jingly bracelets stacked on my wrist (it was apparently fit-in-with-the-Bohemians day). 

I spent the next many years figuring out my true identity. I visited my grandmother often, really listening to her stories and observing the patterns of her life. I began to feel sturdy roots growing where they had been loosely planted all along. I shelled peas on the porch with her, picked cantaloups from her garden, and gobbled up hand-battered fish and okra at my great uncle's annual backyard fish fry. These were the traditions, tied to the land, focused on keeping close to kin with simple food, that finally brought me to a sense of self that felt whole. And being back on this land, by way of Canada, France, and Texas, I had a chance to learn who I really am.

Way up north in Canada, my mother didn't raise us in keeping with the food traditions of our local community, filled with British and Ukrainian influences, but with what she grew up eating. We ate grits for breakfast, Carolina Burgers (a burger with all the fixings but distinguished by the addition of coleslaw), hushpuppies, biscuits, a lot of rice, succotash, field peas, lima beans, sweet tea, creamed corn, and of course, cornbread. Almost every culture in the world has unleavened bread that even its poorest citizens can afford to make, and cornbread is the South's version. Our friends in Canada loved our southern hospitality and annual pig roast. I was exposed to my Southern roots throughout my childhood, but still living adjacent to my own sense of connection to the South.

There is another part of living in North Carolina again as an adult that anchored my sense of place: spending time camping, white water kayaking, hiking, and mountain biking through the Smoky Mountains. My father, while a professor at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro, had helped revive the university's Outdoor Club. He knew those mountains and streams like the back of his hand. I didn't spend as much time in my adulthood in those hazy, blue-ridged mountains with him as I would have liked, but his heart was there, and he had shared his heart with me. Even though I currently live in the Rockies, if someone asks me to envision mountains in my mind’s eye, I can only see the sloping layers and gentle curves of the Appalachians. Despite living in the foothills of the great mountain range of the west, mountains in my heart only ever mean the peaty-smelling earth and fern-covered hillsides of North Carolina.

Now in Colorado, I know that happiness can come even when you live away from your heart home. I live on a street where I know my neighbors and our friends share similar values: time in nature, work-life balance, and an active lifestyle complete with nourishing and high-quality food.  Sorry, Grandma, I am not eating as many biscuits or much fried okra these days, but I am getting a lot of greens, which you also loved—yours were just cooked with fatback. But if I ever miss home, it means I miss my heart home. I miss contact with the sandy dirt in the Piedmont, the salty air of the coast, and the rhododendrons of the Appalachians. The place that lives inside of me and helps make me who I am sometimes feels a tug to be reunited not just in spirit and soul with home, but in the physical place. Sometimes I just want to be in North Carolina.

Your heart home is built into the foundation of your essence and goes where you go—it is the home that lives within. You always know the exact place on earth where your heart home was born. The moment you step foot onto the dock on that lake, or smell the earth in that spot, or stand on that shoreline—the moment you arrive in that place, you have a sense of complete self-understanding. You know who you are in this place, and you like who you are in this place. 

It took moving away from the South for me to finally see that my heart is there, in those twangy accents and firefly evenings. I am content out west, but at times I feel a void that wants to be filled—longing to be back on that land, in the presence of a particular kind of people, feeling more like myself than anywhere else. I had never been homesick through all my moves and cultural adjustments. But now, at long last, I sometimes feel homesick for a place I didn't live in as a child, but that was infused into my being through my family’s culture. I dream of dressy parties, silver punch bowls, a little more formality, reverence for traditions, and buttery, steaming biscuits with molasses and butter. I dream of being there because when I am, it's like two puzzle pieces perfectly fitting together—my soul and the soul of that place snapping in, harmonizing. I sense a profound rightness with the world. Inside of me, there is a hush, a knowing—a deep settling into myself.

When people ask me, Where are you from? My slight pause is because I'm deciding which version to give them. The short one, or the long one. The long one has a lot of data, but doesn't tell much about me. The short reply may be light on details, but it is heavy with the chance we might actually get to know one another. My heart home is in North Carolina. Where is yours?

Enjoy the slow- Heather