This blog title is also the name of a popular country song. I've recently rediscovered country music, but that's a whole 'nother blog. Anyway, the song title fits, so I'm using it.
A friend of mine noted on Facebook today that she's reading a book about Sonoma, California, and it calls up all the feelings she has experienced in growing up and living there for many years of her life. It reminded me how I feel about where I grew up, in Southern California. Several other people also commented to that effect--one woman was reminded of Maine. I think we all have a deep, deep attachment to the places we're from.
After I moved to Northern California, I would periodically return to So Cal for visits to remaining family there--my dad, my son and grandkids. Each time, I would cry as we left to come back north. This lasted for a couple of years. There was such a strong feeling of that being home, where I belonged. There was so much grief over our family dispersing far and wide and no longer having the center it had once had.
Growing up, my entire family lived in one little area of Southern California. We got together at least once a week on the weekends, but often during the week as well. Time passed, children grew up, things changed. I was the first to move out of town, though not too far, an hour or so away. Then my grandparents died, within 6 months of one another. A few years later, my mom died. My sisters and brother moved, two of them out of state. What we'd had no longer existed. Or did it?
Twenty years ago, I ended up in Northern California, in the area my Facebook friend was talking about, near Sonoma. I spent a lot of time in the wine country, in San Francisco, on the Northern California coast in places like Muir Woods and Drake's Beach. Those places began to feel like home. I made friends there, raised my kids there, created memories. Now I've moved even farther north, and the San Francisco Bay area feels like a second home to me. I still return to So Cal to see my dad and my son, but everything has changed, and I no longer cry when I leave.
It's odd, but I traveled in France, years ago, to the south, to a tiny town where my ex-husband's grandparents came from. Driving through the countryside of Southern France, I felt like I was home. It reminded me strongly of Southern California--the light, the terrain, the vegetation. We were not in a touristy area, and almost no one spoke English, but they were very patient with my clumsy French, and they were very "neighborly". Really, that's the best word I can think of to describe their immediate friendliness, and it made me feel right at home.
Last year, I took my daughter, Megan, to Paris. There were so many Starbucks, and McDonalds, and everyone spoke English. It was hard to speak French, unless you spoke it well, because they didn't have the patience. And so, at times I felt like I was back in San Francisco. It was a big city, with museums and restaurants and landmarks, etc. Of course, it was Paris, and San Francisco does not have an Eiffel Tower, Notre Dame, or River Seine. But outstanding landmarks aside, it was a modern big city like so many others. Once again, I felt at home. A nice bonus was that, in spite of not practicing much in recent years, somehow my French has improved to the point that I was able to actually use it to get beneath the tourist veneer. I talked to real people--a server at my hotel, a man making crepes on the street, the woman who owned the little boulangerie around the corner from my hotel, where I went for coffee every morning--and felt "at home".
By bits and pieces a large part of my family, and most of the ones I started out with in So Cal, have gradually migrated to Northern California, to the town of Redding. And here we all are, and now this feels like home. Five years ago, my husband and I bought a ranch in the countryside just outside town, and as our children came to visit they discovered that it immediately reminded them of one particular house they'd lived in as small children in Southern California, and so coming here, now, feels to them like coming home. I like that. I know this house and surroundings physically remind them of that earlier home in lots of ways, but maybe a lot of the feeling comes from us all being together, wherever we are.
Last year, our family hosted a French exchange student, Marianne. She's from Bordeaux, in the south of France, but not the part I visited. I hope to visit Bordeaux someday; Marianne gave us a book so we could learn all about where she was from. She had so much fun here last year, she's coming back to visit again; she and my granddaughter, Kaela, who lives with me, have become great friends, and keep in touch by Facebook and Skype. Kaela is already planning to visit Marianne someday, too.
I think of all the places I've lived and visited and fallen in love with, places where I've felt at home. I think of how my family spread out, and came back together. I watch my own children and grandchildren venture out and away. Yet, through computers and texting, we're never far apart. Though separated by hundreds of miles, we talk almost daily.
It makes me wonder if there won't come a day when someone in our family won't be somewhere far, far out in space, thinking back to where they came from: the planet Earth.
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