Where is home?

In 1984, my life was carefully wrapped up in newsprint, including the toilet paper roll from the bathroom I shared with my brother, and hauled 951 miles south. I was born in Toronto, Canada, on a frosty February in 1968, but the summer before I entered the eleventh grade, my roots, cultivated over sixteen years, were loosened, transported, and transplanted into the red clay of Georgia. They survived, regenerating although never quite achieving the same depth in their new home. Mostly, they bore the shock and adapted to their new ecosystem as best they could.

It’s been forty years since that move, since my dad made the decision to move the locus of the family business to a low-slung factory on the southwest side of Atlanta. When we arrived, the heat was grim and we were fish out of water.

My multicultural, vibrant, and international city was swapped with interminable strip malls, gated communities, and residual racism. Within the first week, our octogenarian neighbor declared to my mother that, “we just lost the war.” Puzzled, we thought we'd missed something during the three days we were on the road. But no, in her mind, the Civil War was fresh as a Georgia peach.

Over the next two years, there were moments where my performance almost qualified me for entry, but they were fleeting and only marginally satisfying, always leaving me with a feverish case of impostor syndrome. If you ask me today where home is, I will look at you blankly and shrug my shoulders. Since my high school graduation in 1986, I’ve moved eight times. It’s a seven year itch that I can’t help but scratch, even when I had two kids and a husband in tow. Wherever my stuff is parked is my home. I’ve heard people described as ‘barnacles’ or ‘butterflies,’ those who root forever, sometimes rearing multiple generations in the same place, and those who flit around from place to place. I am (or maybe have become) the later, with shallow roots and an inclination to blow where the wind takes me. I think nothing of packing up a household and fashioning a new one on different soil.

I often wonder if my wanderlust is innate or the provenance of my uprooting at such a pivotal age. Don’t get me wrong, I love moving; experiencing new places and seeing things with fresh eyes sustains my curiosity and feeds my imagination. But, it also makes it challenging to feel connected and rooted in a community. There is a part of me that wonders if I’ve been searching for this mirage of a place called home for decades. Nothing seems to quite measures up. Or maybe I haven’t found it yet. What would it take for me to root, permanently? Is it merely that I haven’t yet encountred the perfect intersection? Why do I flutter around while another chooses to raise their family in the same house they grew up in?

The intersection of people, place, culture, and economy intrigues me. America has always valued mobility – aim higher, go farther. We value those who are independent and go forth to follow their dreams, but at what cost? Abandoned towns, overcrowded cities, a loneliness epidemic, and a mortal severance from our planet’s ecosystem. Increasingly, technology enables us work from anywhere and younger generations are heeding the call, eschewing place and permanency for dislocation and discovery. And yet 58% of Americans still live in the same state where they were born, never experiencing the gift that the act of leaving can bestow – perspective. Personally, when I think of place I feel absence; the place I left as a teenager has become mythical, an impossible void to fill. But also, the act of leaving sharpened my sense of self, helped me better understand my roots, and heightened my expectation of the places I call home.