Missing Home

I sit in the sunlit room of the office at Melissa and Dale's house in Asheville. The house is empty after the beautiful flutter of comotion that characterizes Saturday mornings here-- as the girls rush off to some soccer event or another. They look older in their dark red uniforms, funny shin-guards strapped to too-long shins that have shot up overnight, like weeds in the dark.

Kenzie sat at the dinner table and easily obliged us by summarizing what she learned in sex ed. These kids are from UU parents, so they pretty much know more than their peers: She reported about the ovaries and the XY chromosomes and the sperm as if they were nothing. The budding sociologist in her noted that it was the boys who were awkward, "freaked out" about periods and such. Her friend sat next to one particular "perv" (this is the kids' word nowadays and I don't think they entirely understand its meaning)... who "stared at the girl next to him" EVERY time they mentioned periods. Kenzie's friend-- a bad ass-- eventually turned to the immature boy and said: "Yeah, it happens to me? You got a problem with it?" The boy sheepishly turned away.

The night before Emma, apparently taking in the "abstincence/reproduction" message too easily, asked her parents: "Well why do people have sex if they don't want to have babies." They re-explained that sex is pleasruable and Dale volunteered, upon Emma's open request, that they too had sex. This was hilarious b/c Kenzie actually got embarassed (normally she is so poised so I must admit its hilarious to see her blush).

The food Dale cooked was something worth writing a poem about, and the whole dinner was just wonderful.

I went to bed last night (too late, having stayed up talking with Melissa until midnight) feeling a strange new feeling of home mixed with sadness and surrealism, maybe a bit of nostalgia or loss? I know I haven't lost anything permanently, but rather am separated from the thing I love most in the world- Home.

It's not just them, this family. It's my blood family and the blue blue mountains we are from (I think writing that cultural essay only increased homesickness). It's my friends and the truly unique amosphere Asheville offers. No where else do I know of where there are liberals interacting so frequently with hillbillies. As a bit of both, I 'spose this place was meant for me.

Sometimes I think there are things in my blood that pull me back here, like a magnet. Like I am meant to be here... like by God. Audrey uses this "call language" sometimes, as they do in the religious community (as in: "I feel called to do this..."). Usually I don't understand it; I'm too human-focused for it to truly resonate with me. My personal translation is: "this is the environment I fit best with right now." Or some such scientific joy-killing thing. :) But I understand the call language only in a few areas: the mountains being the first. I feel called to live there, to be there. I know I can be happy elsewhere (I have built such a life in Knoxville I even miss it sometimes when I'm gone), but I feel I can be fuller, somehow, in the mountains. I know this sounds strange to probably anyone reading this (besides you, Jes?) and maybe it should be undercut and cheapened as just a "cultural artifact" from my Appalchian heritage... but I think it's more. Like seashells are meant to be by the sea, I am meant to be here. And I daydream constantly about moving back. But sometimes I think if these dreams came true my heart would just burst from the joy of it all. If I could live in Asheville with Audrey.

And now as I approach the end of my rambling time, I reach a new sadness-- that I have not been able to describe at all what I set out too-- the strange surrealism of having this be my true home and yet feeling at home in Knoxville. I feel at once drawn back here and alienated from it, and I think I have a new interpretation of what Asheville's own Thomas Wolfe meant when he wrote: "You can't go home again." And yet-- his other book was entitled "Look Homeward Angel." Which one is it now, Tom? :)

Asheville is a different kind of home... different even than my parents and my grandparents. I feel a home in them but know I am not meant to live there anymore. This is different. It's like I'm in the wrong place-- misplaced somehow. I always thought it was temporary and now I wonder whether I'm kidding myself. I've got Audrey and I've got this damn degree, and all these cultural forces that persuade us away from our Homes. We are an increasingly homeless nation. And I'm the kind of tree that needs deep, deep roots. I want to be very tall and solidly tangled with the earth, so that I can be closer to the sky.

If there was a God, which as an avid agnostic I do not come down on either side of, she would indeed prefer Mount Pisgah, here in my native North Carolina.

And now I must rush off to watch 11 year-olds play soccer with their hearts wide open... and then meet Jes for the afternoon.... I am blessed and aching all at once. The way it should be, I suppose.