…because I have a complicated relationship with rocks. See, my father taught geology. Technically he’s a paleontologist but what I knew was that he led a lot of field trips into the Blue Ridge and Masanutten mountains of the Shenandoah Valley around us and the house was full of geods.It was an exquisitely beautiful place to grow up. The sunsets over the mountain ridges were so stunning that I’d regularly join my mother on the deck just to watch them and for years my standard doodle was that view. Gorgeous pinks and purples melting down over blue rocks, gently folding me into the Valley.
I drew the sun setting over the mountains in crayon and pencil and pen and finally colored chalks compulsively for years. This is the same country that Thomas Jefferson chose to build Monticello in – just over the mountain near Charlottesville, an hours’ drive away. I understand his obsession with that country. To be in it, to smell it, to walk it, to taste it, to belong to it. It’s the kind of earth that you bottle a few cups of just so you can keep it on your desk, to think about on the long days, to remember on the tough days, to dream about.
I once bought a mug at Luray Caverns, a system of underground caves in Northern Virginia, with the following motto:
To be a Virginian,
By birth, marriage, adoption, or even on one’s mother’s side,
Is an introduction to any state in the union, passport to any foreign country
And a benediction from the Almighty God.
I truly internalized the place that is Virginia and I loved it with my whole being.
When my parents divorced I was 12 and my mother moved me and my brother back to her home state of Michigan, back to the best place she could imagine: Ann Arbor. At the time I did not, in point of fact, realize that the South had lost the Civil War. I was under the distinct impression that it had been a draw. Just like Vietnam. I’m not sure how much of that was culture and how much formal schooling but it was a rude awakening to learn that the Southland had LOST in no uncertain terms. I didn’t figure out the part about Vietnam until high school. Early learning dies hard.
I’ve come to view Michigan as my home but I don’t care about it the way I cared about Virginia. I don’t feel protective over it. It does not inspire me. It feels like a place to live.
I no longer mourn over my lost sense of place and I no longer consider myself a Virginian. I might tell someone I was raised in Virginia, but only if it comes up. I no longer go out of my way to introduce the idea into a conversation about personal history. I no longer feel torn when the question, “Where are you from?” comes up. I’m firmly “from” Lansing, Michigan, where I own a home in a subdivision and work for the state and pass the beggars on every major street corner from one end of town to the other day after day and year after year. I’ve grown up, and moved on. But I do remember that sense of belonging with wistful…
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