Home

Dorothy was right. There’s no place like home. I just got back from a week in Colorado (my home state), visiting family and old friends, and, it was wonderful. The air was dry, the temperatures cool; the crisp evenings and chilly early mornings made a jacket necessary. Imagine that – a jacket in August!

My dad lives just far enough from the foothills of the Rocky Mountains to have a marvelous view of those magnificent, still snow-topped peaks – yes, there is snow left in Colorado in August…And, he has a wheat farm out on the Eastern Plains, where you can see first hand those “purple mountain majesties” and “amber waves of grain” we sing about in “America the Beautiful.”

We visited the farm, and my Gramma – still kickin’ at 96. I did some hiking and took some really nice long walks. The family’s big on bird feeding, so I got to see some amazing hummingbird action – right up close. And, every evening, in addition to a lot of good food and loud laughter, there was a beautiful mountain sunset to be enjoyed.

My daughter went with me for the first part of the week, and she was amazed at how “happy and comfortable” (as she put it) I seemed to be, there in my native land, surrounded by my earliest family and oldest friends. “Why don’t you move back here, Mom?” she asked me, during one of our mountain walks.

And, that is a question that has haunted me since we moved to Georgia, some 21 years ago. Initially, I gave the Southern experiment two years – if it wasn’t working by then, we’d move back “home.” Then, we figured we couldn’t uproot the kids during elementary school, and by middle school, they were settled in. After that, my moving “back home” became after both kids graduated from high school. But, then they went to Eastern colleges, which meant if Mom wanted to see her offspring with any frequency, she’d have to stay put in Georgia a little while longer…

Surprise, surprise! Both kids married people from Georgia, found jobs in Georgia, settled down and made homes in Georgia, so here I am, “stuck” for good, if I want to continue to enjoy a close vital relationship with my kids, their spouses, my grand-dogs, and eventually, I hope, grandkids.

For years, my dad would ask, “When are you moving back?” And, for years, I’d say, “Maybe sometime soon, Pop.” I think we both saw the handwriting on the wall…He stopped asking a few years ago.

It’s not that Georgia isn’t nice. It is. It’s just it’s not what I grew up with and for that reason, it will never feel like home. When you live the first half of your life in a cool, dry place where the humidity never reaches 40-percent, you never get used to sweating the way I do here.

When you grow up with long open vistas and miles of sky above, you never get used to all the trees, and the short distance you can see ahead here. When you grow up with mountains always on one side of you, clearly indicating west, you never orient to which way is which because all there is to guide off of is a wall of greenery and trees...It goes on and on. The sky colors are different; the air smells different; I miss snow in the winter time. The short bursts of rain so welcome there take the form of days and days, and buckets and buckets, of rain here. And, the harshest cold a Colorado winter can throw at you has nothing on that bone-chilling, damp cold a Georgia January brings…

Conversely, and perhaps ironically, my kids grew up here, so their preferences – their version of “home” – is distinctly Southern. Neither of them likes the cold, and they don’t sweat nearly as much as I do. They grew up surrounded by lush greenery, so the Western landscape looks “sort of brown and dead” to them. While they like the mountains well enough, their preference is for the beach – because that’s where their childhood vacations have been. When they go to Colorado, after a while, they can’t wait to “get back home,” because of a Southern version of all the same kinds of reasons I love being in West.

I told my daughter, during our walk (and my Dad a little later), that after years of contemplation and comparison, I have decided my true home – the home where my heart is – will remain in the South. For as much as I love the places and people of my past, my current and future has been right here in Georgia for 21 years now, and I guess that means I’m here to stay.