The Question I Hate; or, (d) none of the above

"So where is home?"

Can I tell you how much I hate that question?

And it's not because I'm ashamed of where I was born or raised or where I just moved from. It's just I don't really know where "home" is.

I spent most of my life in South Mississippi, in a small paper mill town (smells like money!) that not many people have heard of.  I haven't lived there full-time since I was 17, so even though it's where I'm from, I can go to the grocery store today and not recognize a single person. That doesn't mean my heart doesn't pitter-patter every time we exit the interstate and we're finally on the way there. My parents have lived at the same address most of my life, and although my bedroom looks different,  it's still "my" room, my house, my corner of the neighborhood.  It's just not where I call home anymore. My family, my classmates I've known and loved since I was five, the friends from my youth, they are home.

There is a certain snobbery and hierarchy amongst Mississippians, where many Deltans tend to think of themselves as the top of the social strata. I realized a few years ago that to some extent, I, too, am guilty of this. Most of my life, when asked, I've said,  "I was raised in South Mississippi---but I was born in the Delta." Of course, being born somewhere and living there five years doesn't really qualify it as your home.

Except, of course, the corner of Main and E. Clay in Greenville, where my grandparents and great uncle/aunt shared a large yard adjoining their two houses, which is also my home (even if one of the houses isn't standing anymore). The big oak tree with acorns---I'd make little hats out of the caps---and the forbidden leaf pile my sister and cousins and I would sneak into while my Papaw wasn't looking--they are as important to me as my childhood house. That tree is also gone. My love of books started at the rickety old McCormick Book Inn, an independent book store, just a block away, and I'm incredibly sad to hear of its recent closure. Like so many important things from the past, all these places will just have to live in my memory from now on.

My cousin took this pic of the McCormick Book Inn in 2010.

I've heard that smell is the strongest of the senses, and I can recognize the scent of black Delta soil anywhere. 

Even though my birthplace isn't it, magnolias and gardenias and Delta dirt smell like home.

Then there is another place, the bend in a road where my grandfather and grandmother built their first (and until 60 years later, only) house, across the street from the house where my grandfather was born. All around is land that at one time, my family farmed. They had an amazing yard for Easter egg hunts and my last time there, my sister and I and our families got out in the field next to the house---the one in front of the packing shed with a huge, walk-in freezer---and played soccer on what used to be a big garden plot. I feel a strong connection to that land.

My grandparents sold their house and property and my grandmother now lives next door to my parents. She is home. But her house is not.

Shelling peas with Grammaw = love

There's Georgia and Colorado and Washington and Texas. We have a child born to the last two states (and lived in those longer than I lived in my birthplace), so I guess part of those states will always be part of us.

But that still doesn't make them home.

The people, however, are. I have a core group of friends who know just the right thing to say or the right advice to give, and we can comfortably pick up our conversation from where we last left off, no matter how many years or miles apart.

One of my all-time favorite quotes is from the beautifully written book The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. He sums the life of a wanderer much more eloquently than I ever could, in the character of Port:

He did not think of himself as a tourist; he was a traveler. The difference is partly one of time, he would explain. Whereas the tourist generally hurries back home at the end of a few weeks or months, the traveler, belonging no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly, over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another. Indeed, he would have found it difficult to tell, among the many places he had lived, precisely where it was he had felt most at home.

This is the quandary of many a military brat. I know because I married one. He tells people, "I'm from all over." As one of my colleagues, also a brat, says, "I'm from everywhere. I'm from nowhere." And now I'm raising kids who one day may tell people the same thing.

That's one of the issues of living on such an isolated base. Some people never get out of their houses for their entire time here, never go to the beach, never take advantage of many of the free or almost-free recreational activities. They are homesick, and they isolate themselves, making themselves even more miserable. They hate it here and can't wait to leave. They don't even try.

Seriously, how could someone hate living with this view? 

Then there are those of us who go with the flow and really can't answer the question of home. For me, it is not one geographical place. It makes globe-tripping somewhat easier, although I am really a little jealous of anyone who can answer that question with strong conviction.