Shine.Shine.Shine.

Choosing North Carolina

I was brought to this state reluctantly. kicking and screaming inside of my innocent child’s mind. i didn’t want to leave my extended family,what i previously considered to be home and everything i had ever known. longleaf pine trees have a very strange look to a 5 year old who has only seen oaks and elms. i cried a lot and laid in bed wishing my new life was a dream and that i’d wake up back where i had come from. it wasn’t until i was 13 that i started to really accept north carolina and that i was at peace to be here. there were fun times in between those years and good things about this place but still not home. even my mother didn’t call it home. and from the time i got here i knew i’d leave at some point. as i got older though, i wanted to leave but not for the same reasons. I wanted to live in a city, i had missed out on living in a city and i had an inner city girl that needed to be reconciled with. i loved North Carolina but I really didn’t know what it was like to live anywhere else and i felt that in order to truly choose NC, to truly love it and to know I belonged here, to claim it as home in the depths of my soul that i would have to leave. i’d have to experience something else and choose to come back. i knew this. and so i did it. my time in chicago is another story for another time but while i loved it there and while there is an undeniable midwestern corner of my heart, i was always transient. 

a decision to come home was made easy for me by circumstances and in the process i wondered if i was ready, if i’d regret it, if i’d be heartbroken to be leave my city self behind, if i’d be able to go back to a small world after living in such a huge one. those are questions that aren’t answered when you pull across the border. 

they were answered over the following 8 months and will probably continue to be. they were answered when things haven’t gone perfect and yet i still know i’m where i’m supposed to be. when there’s no definitive reason yet something feels right, like a foundation of comfort, an underlying accordance.

i appreciate things i didn’t even realize weren’t in other places and things i didn’t even realize i liked or cared about or knew. things i didn’t appreciate. magnolias and whippoorwills, the smell of pine, squirrels crossing my path, vinegar bbq, bluegrass, boiled peanuts, the beauty of pine cones, rugged outdoorsmen, the country and the small towns.

so while i consider myself to have several homes in the midwest, i now feel certain that first and foremost my home is pinehurst, north carolina.

i feel like i can truly claim the south now, well, because i have earned it. i know it. i recognize it. i have lived it. i have lived here.