Against the Wind

Last summer I went back to the first place I ever left.  My family moved from Laramie to Cheyenne, Wyoming when I was 6, and then two years later we lived in Laramie again for a short while before moving to Texas.  We drove away, 21 hours in a car without air conditioning in August, and my baby sister cried every minute of it.  

At the beginning of third grade, I stood in front of the class in Dallas and introduced myself to the other children sitting at desks in neat and well-spaced rows.  I told the class I was from Wyoming, and the teacher, lit cigarette in hand (honest, it was the 80s), drawled "Mi-ami?! How excitin!" No, I said.  Wyoming.  The state.  And she looked at me blankly.  So I showed her, on the map pulled down in front of the blackboard behind her--this is Miami.  In Florida.  And way over here is Wyoming.  There are mountains but also the prairie.  And she sent me to the hall for being rude.  I didn't mean to be rude, I just didn't know what to do with a teacher who had never heard of the place I was from.  Was I supposed to smile and nod when she went on about beautiful beaches?  

I spent a lot of that year in the hall.  I could never remember to say Ma'am when I responded to my teacher, looking her in the eye as she asked, trying not to think too hard about the clumps of mascara caked on her sparse and spidery lashes.  I'd never heard anyone say it before, except cowboys on old movies, and it just wouldn't stick in my head.  Yes, I'd say.  "Yes, WHAT?" she'd demand, and then send me to the hall when she saw my blank look.  In my memory, there were no windows in the classroom or the hall, and everything was cast in the sick yellow of industrial flourescents and the smell of old cigarettes.  I'd try to not think about my classroom before, in Wyoming, with a whole wall full of windows flooded with sunshine, or my old teacher, who would spend her break playing guitar while we had free reading.  I wouldn't feel the sharp air, or see the bluebird sky.  That place didn't exist anymore, for me, so there was no point wishing for it.

I learned to say I was from the mountains.  People understood that.  I could never make my mouth soften around words enough to sound like everyone else, make the hard edges of consonants melt away and the vowels stretch.  "You'll never be a Texan," said my neighbor.  "You have to be born here."  And so I learned to be an outsider, who doesn't quite know all the rules and who says and does things just a bit differently.  I learned to be game to try new things and to laugh along at the funny way I talked.  My step-grandmother eventually added my name to her family bible, but clearly noted that I was born in other places, to other people than hers. She wasn't wrong, I see now--keeping accurate records is important in its way.  

In time, I just stopped answering the question of where I was from.  "Oh, lots of places," I'd say, then ask about their places.  I was more interested in that, anyway--favorite foods and new words and fun things about places I hadn't been yet.  I started to wander, to find places in the world that held hints of home, for me, and learn about even more new things.  I loved the open skies of Scotland and the straightforwardness of the Germans.  I found mountains in Vietnam and Japan that felt like familiar ground to me, forests in the Australian bush whose birds sang of home.  I tried foods and accents and words and found other outsiders and wanderers and a whole world full of places and people I love.  

Except there were still moments I wished for a home.  I smelled lilacs on the street in Kyoto and cried right there for my Grandma's little house with its tree and hollyhocks and poppies and her whoop of a laugh.  I visited family I hadn't seen in 25 years and was cracked open at how they welcomed me, how I introduced myself to a man who hadn't seen me since I was a toddler and he said, "Oh, girl.  I would know you anywhere."  

My meandering, as meandering does, brought me back to the first place I left.  I didn't need Apple maps to take me to my Grandma's house last summer, even though I hadn't seen it in 34 years.  The wind in my ears in my prairie town--aching, insistent--hadn't changed; the purity of the sunlight was the same.  I saw the mountains I'd looked for in every towering cloud on the horizon on four continents, and they fitted themselves into my memory and explained my internal compass.  I wrote a poem on Best Western stationery about it, because of course I did.  I wasn't NOT going to be introspective and melodramatic, all of a sudden.  I watched waves of prairie pass my window as I drove and felt as right in that place as the antelope cropping the new grass.  The mountains were my bones.  The people I missed were gone from this place and from any other, but their footsteps were here, and my footsteps were here, and my feet knew these paths. 

Then I drove away.  Laramie isn't my home.  I've spent most of my life, by far, in other places. I think my straightforward Texas neighbor from all those years ago would agree that even if you're born somewhere, you have to build something there to belong.

Four years ago, I wrote about how I felt defined by my desire to have a home, by my ability to have built a home when I didn't have one.  I left that home and found it changed when I returned, or found myself changed enough that I wasn't sure how I fit there anymore, and it was kind of discomfitting.  I've learned to sometimes address things I'm worried about by telling myself that I'm interested in how that will turn out.  It feels like that kind of detachment gives me a little power to not go down with the ship when the ship does sink.  While I'm still a little obsessed with the idea of belonging, of rootedness, of home, maybe I'll say I'm just interested in the connection between people and places.  I'm interested in how we're attached to the places we leave.  I'm interested in how the wind drives some of us across seas and sagebrush, how we follow the song of wandering and new places even as we keen for the places we run from and the roots we rip from the earth.  I am a person who leaves, descended from people who leave.  I am now also a person who returns, and I haven't figured out yet how to say what that means to me.  I don't know how I can be a rooted wanderer, how I can have a place that isn't my place, but I'm interested in that.