Echoes
I’ve been in North Carolina for almost a month now. Last night I sat at a Memorial Day picnic on a muggy evening, watching kids bounce around on one of those giant inflatable castles. There were lightning bugs and the air was humid and the grass was long and the branches of the trees shifted in the slight breeze. It felt right. Everything here feels right. The houses are supposed to look like this, the people are supposed to talk like this, the summer is supposed to hit us all with a rolling burst of heat and thunderstorms. Somewhere in my childhood, I think, my internal compass was fixed for this place, and everywhere else has been not right in comparison.
Feeling right about something is, as far as I can tell, like loving something; you have to feel its absence even in the dark slow curves of your spine; it has to be imprinted on you so strongly that everything else will be not right. This place, this state, has been absent from me at different points in my life, and only because of that can I start to understand the mourning of Irish-American songs, the longing of the Israelites, the sparse writings of the Desert Fathers. Loss of home can pierce more deeply than death.
Place is, of course, always about people too. And part of the rightness here is my family, all the branches over this state; my parents across the city, my grandmother in Fayetteville, my aunts and uncles in Raleigh and Sanford, my cousins in Greensboro and Asheville, and on outward. They were my earliest constellations, and I have little idea how to orient myself without them.
But mostly I know this feeling of rightness in terms of places. My feelings for people change; sometimes one person feels right, sometimes friendships are right. And sometimes they’re not. Even in the closest family, the relationships are always in flux.
Often, places don’t change as rapidly as people. Driving through Reidsville on my way to Charlotte today, I had so many strange jolts; the Rainbow Inn motel on the right side of the road, the cemetery on the left; they looked almost the same. This was the most familiar road of my childhood, and only a few more rust stains on the hotel and an unfamiliar paved path in the cemetery had changed. Someone, I expect, will drive down that road in another twenty years and see most of the same buildings, the same restaurants, the same long reach of the highway. Perhaps it will be me, and I’ll once again feel that strange echo.
Feeling right about something is, as far as I can tell, like loving something; you have to feel its absence even in the dark slow curves of your spine; it has to be imprinted on you so strongly that everything else will be not right. This place, this state, has been absent from me at different points in my life, and only because of that can I start to understand the mourning of Irish-American songs, the longing of the Israelites, the sparse writings of the Desert Fathers. Loss of home can pierce more deeply than death.
Place is, of course, always about people too. And part of the rightness here is my family, all the branches over this state; my parents across the city, my grandmother in Fayetteville, my aunts and uncles in Raleigh and Sanford, my cousins in Greensboro and Asheville, and on outward. They were my earliest constellations, and I have little idea how to orient myself without them.
But mostly I know this feeling of rightness in terms of places. My feelings for people change; sometimes one person feels right, sometimes friendships are right. And sometimes they’re not. Even in the closest family, the relationships are always in flux.
Often, places don’t change as rapidly as people. Driving through Reidsville on my way to Charlotte today, I had so many strange jolts; the Rainbow Inn motel on the right side of the road, the cemetery on the left; they looked almost the same. This was the most familiar road of my childhood, and only a few more rust stains on the hotel and an unfamiliar paved path in the cemetery had changed. Someone, I expect, will drive down that road in another twenty years and see most of the same buildings, the same restaurants, the same long reach of the highway. Perhaps it will be me, and I’ll once again feel that strange echo.