“What role does geography play in your understanding of home” is a question I often ask Reframing Rural guests but this week, I asked my partner. As we hid from Seattle’s heat wave with our feet in a shaded kiddie pool, we talked about how home is a feeling of belonging. How home is something you make for yourself by embedding yourself into a community, by leaving your phone at home and with no particular destination in mind, openly exploring your environment. It’s less to do with where you are on the map, he suggested, and more to do with the curiosity you have for the place you’re in. This idea challenged my idea of home being rooted in one place, in a “homeplace.” Perhaps places like my farm on Montana's Northern Great Plains, or my college town of Missoula, are places I have endless curiosity for, and that's why they feel like home? Some days I want to explore environments that have fewer buildings, fast cars and sidewalks. I want to roam directionless and see what unforced ideas arise. That's why I make it a point to return to my Montana homeplaces every few months, so I can ditch the concrete, immerse myself in the big sky and witness the day to day progression of wildflowers blooming and geese migrating. Still when you return to a place it's not the same as when you left it, and this back and forth can lead to a feeling of rootlessness, a feeling like you don't belong in either place. Reading books like @sarah_smarsh's Heartland and @gracywrites's Uprooted makes me feel less alone when I wrestle with these thoughts. Grace writes "I often feel like I don't belong in Idaho or in Virginia: both defined by my roots and remade by my present reality. In her memoir, Heartland, Sarah Smarsh says her life 'has been a bridge between two places: the working poor and 'higher' economic classes. The city and the country.'" Grace continues "Perhaps life would get easier if I just let go of one side of the bridge: if I stopped going back and forth and chose one place or the other." Maybe it would, but then what about the bridges we’re building? Thank you Grace and Sarah for your wonderful books, for sharing your experiences and helping me think through my own.
