Fruits of Insanity

The USA: Home

Home is a difficult place to define. I’ve lived all over the United States, but ultimately, I’m not sure where I could call home. I don’t know how to grow roots and settle myself into a place. I live in Tennessee now, and have for sixteen years—more than twice as long as anywhere else in my life, but I don’t feel connected here. My tongue doesn’t twist into the shape of their voices, my mouth doesn’t water for their food, and when I think of perhaps living here for the rest of my life, my feet long to wander away.

At the same time, it feels strange to call the entirety of the United States my home. Yes, I’ve lived in eight different states in my forty years—Arizona, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New York, Maryland, Utah, and Tennessee. I have lived in the Sonora Desert and the Colombia River valley, the Appalachians and the Rockies, East, West, North, South—I’ve lived in most visited them all, from Louisiana to Maine, from California to Georgia.

I’ve stood inside an old freighter, retired from the Great Lakes to rest on Lake Erie, and listened to the metal creak and groan with the water. I’ve stood below Niagara Falls and felt the thunder of it shake me, felt the spray of it on my face and hair. I’ve stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon and imagined how long it would take to fall to the bottom I couldn’t quite see. I’ve watched Old Faithful spray boiling water into the air and felt it fall on me, cooled by its passage. Once I saw Mt. Rushmore in the distance—the heads small and hidden by greenery.

In Ohio, there is a blue pool that wells up from the depths of the earth—no bottom, no air to change the flavor of the water. In New York, there is a museum dedicated entirely to music boxes in all their varieties. In Idaho, near a hill where a stone cairn marks my great-grandfather, there’s a cave coated in ice with great ice pillars standing, some cracked and fallen. I’ve seen them. I know these places, and they’ve marked me with their flavor.

Yet, there is so much I haven’t seen. I’ve never been to Rhode Island, in all my travels. I’ve never been to Disneyland or the Florida keys except in story. I’ve never walked inside a lighthouse in Maine—except in pictures. I’ve never walked the Appalachian Trail. I’ve seen hurricanes and tornados and blizzards, but never felt the earth quake beneath my feet. The United States of America I know feels more like the catalog of a tourist than the diary of a forty-year-old woman who has lived here all my life.

Where is home then? Is it four walls and a roof? Is it a city or a landscape? Is it the town I’ve written about for the past five years as I’ve prepared my thesis—a town that doesn’t exist outside my imagination? Is it the people who have shaped me? I remember teachers and friends touching my childhood over and over, and then drifting away. Is it family?

Perhaps that’s where home lies for me. In the ties that bind me to my sisters and brother, my nieces and nephews, my parents and cousins, aunts and uncles. If I have any roots, they exist in the people who have always been there for me, the only constants in my life. Maybe that’s why I travel so much, wandering the world because I can find home again with them. Wherever they are.

word count: 603

Week One: The USA
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