Foundational Shifting

So, I stumbled upon the following essay that I wrote and submitted to skirt! magazine, long before I ever dreamed I'd be on its masthead. This is one of my many essays that was rejected...I penned it about a year and a half ago, post-graduation and just before I embarked on the trail west to Birmingham. (pictured above is the famous Ivywood: home to the majority of my college-made memories). It's been a tumultuous and yet joyous journey to today.

Home Grown

He used to sit on his porch bare-chested under his overalls. He’d wave as we drove thirty-five miles an hour past his white-washed farmhouse on our way to church on Sunday. Every Sunday. We drove to church and back, and there he’d be, sipping his slow life and rocking gently. From the backseat of our family car, my sister and I waved back faithfully. Not only did we expect to see that old farmer each week in his weathered chair, we depended on him. We needed his slow rocking to tell us that some things would never change, that home would always be home.

But, things did change and before long, the idyllic scene turned into a bulldozed mess and the site of a new county library. Across the high-traffic street now sits a high-profile golf course. Things ain’t what they used to be around home. That’s for dang skippy.

When I left for college, I never shed a single homesick tear. A new place simply forced me to redefine home. For two years, home was a place I could not bring myself to call home while I lived there. The college dorm was where my mail came, but it was not home. It was just the place where I climbed the ladder to my lofted bed and lay my head each night. It was just a place in whose narrow hallways I left wet footprints as I squeaked my way from the community bathroom toting my water-logged shower caddy to my room to get decent, praying to God that I wouldn’t see a boy en route. Surely, a place like this could never be home.

For the latter two years of my undergraduate education, I resided off-campus in an apartment with four other girls where impromptu dance parties were commonplace. Friends and I started driving across states for football games and learned to sleep five to a bed during weekend trips to the beach. I started to gain the confidence to speak louder, to flirt shamelessly, to sing outside of the shower. Visits home became less frequent as I began a love affair with Athens and the life I was starting to settle into there.

And then one day, it happened.

I was on the phone with my mom, making the call to tell her that I had arrived safely back to school after a weekend away. Yeah mom. It was fun. I’m here. I just wanted to let you know that I’m home.

Without my knowing, home had forwarded its address to the place where I had chipped away at my insecurities to find my sense of belonging. Home was no longer assigned a single street number. Instead of being a place where I could hang my hat, it became the people with whom I could rest in myself. Somehow, without my realizing that it was happening, I was learning that home had to become an intangible concept rather than a house atop concrete foundation. Home could be found in a different zip code, in a different state, even in a different culture.

One of life’s steady constants is change. Being so, it wasn’t long after my great revelation about home that my time at college began to wane. Now, after four years in a place that taught what it means to be at home, I am faced with another great move that will challenge me to stand on my recently-formed theory. In one week, I will pack up a Budget truck with four years worth of miscellaneous kitchen items, picture frames and clothing fads and head to a new place where I will be forced to begin anew…again.

New job, new apartment, and with time, hopefully, some new friends. I find myself wondering if this transition will be any easier than it was for the last time I took a risky leave of absence from my safe life. For four years, I was that old farmer. Sitting, rocking and waving, I never gave too much thought to the fact that my bulldozer was just around the corner.

That farmer’s scene is preserved in my memory like a movie scene – one that set life to a beautiful soundtrack of romance. It’s one of those scenes that makes you remember what it is to feel. Like a great battle scene complemented with a symphony of drum beats or a majestic pan of a mountain range accompanied by the violin’s sad song. It’s like the feeling of when two long-awaited lovers finally move in for a kiss set to the crescendo of an instrumental masterpiece. These are moments when something deep and transcendent happens inside the heart of a viewer.

It’s a surge of hope that the world is indeed a wonderful place, that profound emotion is not just something that Hollywood is capable of manufacturing. Sometimes, God gives us small moments in life that confirm that by telling us that great courage and strength and love are real. That being at home is very REAL. When I think back on the old farmer on the hill, I know that it is. I know that home is such a dominant concept in my life because there is something very genuine about human desire for timelessness: a life not operated by blackberries, cell phones and deadlines. I hope that heaven means a whole lot of porch-rocking.