Being homesick

I hope you whip this post out on any random thread. I'll laugh every time.

 

I'm sort of the opposite of many on here. I hated my hometown (or more accurately the town we moved to in fifth grade) the whole time I was there. Hate. Hate. Hate. Bunch of townie prep assholes and proudly anti-intellectual hillbillies. I hated the whole damn state of Tennessee really, despite the fact that virtually all of Mom's family still lived in our old hometown, just one county over. I started counting down the months until I could go to college out of state on the first day of 7th grade. Even after living away for a decade, I enjoyed visiting the folks but was more than overjoyed to leave the place in the rearview mirror at the end of the weekend.

A little over a year ago my granny died. Now every day I live with the feeling that I'm supposed to "be home" even though I really don't like the town any more than I did before. My parents are staring down the road towards facing their own mortality and the guilt gnaws at me. I'm not from West-By-God, but I still have the John Denver line haunting me in my mind.

Driving down the road I get a feeling
That I should have been home yesterday
Yesterday

So now inexplicably I spend my days with old bluegrass tunes stuck in my head and nights surfing for arcane bits of regional history and YouTube for old commercials from my childhood. I sometimes get the sinking feeling those mountains are going to suck me back in, like it or not.

 

I've thought about this some. We moved around a bit when I was young, but I've always sort of thought of "home" as where we lived when I was in high school -- the old "Wonder Years" era in the 1960s. But I've pretty much lost all contact with everyone from there who I thought would be my friends forever.

So I guess home is where I am now. After all, lived here for more than 30 years now. If it ain't here, I don't know where it would be.

 

It was a pun

 

Home is not where I lay my head! Home is that house on the dirt road in the middle of nowhere in Middle Alabama. Home is the pasture and 50 cows -- not Tupelo, Natchez, Oxford or Fort Rucker.

Never considered myself homesick, although when I think about it I sometimes get a sad feeling inside.

My mom and stepdad considered selling the place a few months ago, and although I told mom I thought it was a good idea, I broke down and cried for 30 minutes at the thought of it. There. I said it. I cried like a six-year old girl.

This will sound corny as hell. And as much as I hate most of Nashville country, that Brooks and Dunn song, "Red Dirt Road," isn't very easy to listen to.

 

I knew somebody would get it.

 

Even though I have no desire to ever live in my hometown again ... I've definitely grown more fond of it since I left. I miss the things I liked, and am interested in the things that have changed.

When you only have to visit a place, and don't have to live there, it's a lot easier to like it. No need to waste your time on all the things you didn't like about it.

 

What kind of loser does it make me if I admit that almost 41 years after I was born here, I still live in the same freaking town.

 

It doesn't.

If you like it there, why leave?

 

And while you still live in the same town, I've called no less than six different cities my home. And while I didn't like all of those cities, where I slept every night was definitely my home.

 

I take the opposite approach. These other places, I'm just passing through.

 

When I got married to Ruthie in 1991, she went everywhere I went (whither thou goest, I shall go...hmmm). And she was all the home I needed during my Navy days.

So wherever I lived was definitely home.