Homesickness

I really need to stop longing for a culture I am content with. I need to embrace the low points of the journey, and enjoy the luscious crops of the fertile valleys.

I thought that my life was built upon adventure, and seeking out the more to see. The irresistible drive to continue onward until I've circled around full. I guess that isn't the way it is supposed to be.

I do not want to fall into the conservative mindset of "conserve what you have, it always works", and if it hasn't been conserved, go back to it. That must be the stubborn Midwestern kicking back in.

I miss my home.

I do have a home. My base of operations is Thurston, Ohio. While my family may not live there anymore, it is the town I identify with the most. I grew up there. I learned there. I experienced the first threshes of life there. Identified my loves, explored my passions, and got the hell out, only to discover it again once I had left, and once they had left.

I do have a home. My lyrical muse lies in the fields adorning the mountains of the Swannanoa Valley. The sweltering humid heat of the morning fog makes me pine to live those experiences again. Marching through the forest every morning to greet the academic rigor of the day, only to end the week in a celebration of Mario Kart and Magic the Gathering.

My method of travel is the Catalyst. She travels with me between all points known and unknown. She is my temporary home, gracious enough to host me on the long journeys through the desert, over the tallest mountains on the continent, and between those two points where I am solidly anchored.

Out here though, there is no home. There is only a drift of the shells of a community. It's too big to have a cohesive whole, but too small to have specific individual parts. There is no definition here, it's just like an impressionist painting that has been rained on.

All the natural area cannot fix this place. No amount of rare summer storms, humid warm nights, nor fields of far off crops can bring me back enough to want to stay. The noise is too precise, the hum of the highway too close, and the entrapment of the houses too focused.

The only thing that comforts me tonight is the far off sound of the port, with its clattering rails slowly moving towards cargo ships, and the soft chirps of few lone crickets somewhere in the neighborhood. But even that is sometimes lost in the chatter of cars and wavering voices and settlements around me.