the land I love

On my way home from work the other week, stopped at the intersection of State and the Bayfront Parkway, I was arrested by a revelation that drove itself like Judith's tent peg into my skull. I was lucky the light was a long one.

The typically gray winter day had caught my attention a few minutes previously because of the clouds. Erie clouds are like nowhere else. In my high school days my best friend Hillori and I would spend hours staring up at the clouds and wishing that we could make a living simply painting the daily sky. Each day provided a new panorama of collected particulates and water that did something to set the heart at ease.

That day was no exception. As I left the office I had noticed the heavy cumulus formations hanging low over the city. They stood just far enough apart, like the narrow houses below them, to let the watery winter sunshine slide through the cracks and leak a little daylight on the buildings. What really snagged my attention was how obviously they were lake clouds. You can't see the lake from 12th Street, where I was hunting down the post office, but just looking at the sky, you knew there was a body of water, a big one, somewhere close. The clouds had a saturated shimmer about them that reflected the shallow light like they never do inland.

As I pulled up to the end of State, where the road runs into the dock and the dock drops into the Bay, and waited for the light, I stared at the clouds some more. You could soak in a little sunlight, but you couldn't see any blue. Not from the naked sky, that is. I felt my lungs stop working and barely noticed as I drank in a sight I haven't seen in years, one I once took completely for granted. The underbellies of the clouds were blue.

They were reflecting, in a paler, smokier simulacrum, the water. I thought how the water was supposed to reflect the sky, not the other way around, and blinked back the swift lancing of tears: It was beautiful. In a "perfect circle for infinity," the clouds reflected the water reflecting the clouds, and you couldn't quite tell which one came first. The sky and water go together like a lovers' gaze, absorbed, unending, inseparate.

The light changed, and I shifted gears and turned the car east toward home. Every few seconds I craned my neck to the left to stare at the sky some more, allowing myself for the first time in five years to bask in the sudden sun of joy that swelled up from the pit of my stomach. I love my home. I have always loved my home, and when I ran away from it almost five years ago I abjured that love, having determined never to return. I thought to love the beauty of other places; instead, I stopped noticing beauty. What bowled me over that day, watching the clouds in my rear and side view mirrors, was the realization, dizzying like a breath of free air after sitting for hours in a stuffy closet, that this was the first time in five years I had actually seen something. In hardening my heart against my love of homeland, I stopped seeing. I made myself look, every once in awhile, but I didn't see.

I flashed back to a conversation that Hillori and I frequently shared in our girlhood days, as we awoke to our fierce but particular patriotism and spun theories that explained human history and ruminated on the Civil War. We often said that even if we might not die for America, we would die for Pennsylvania. We would give everything for the soil on which we were born.

In South Bend Meg and I had a friend named Jess who hails from Philadelphia. Jess and I would talk for hours about the awesomeness of Pennsylvania, and Meg often told me, shaking her head, “You Pennsylvania people. I’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve never seen anyone in the world who love their state as much as Pennsylvanians do.”

I hadn’t thought of it as a state-wide phenomenon until then, but I started to take notice after that, and it always seemed to me that Meg was right: We’re crazy in love with our home state, even if we never plan to live there again. We get so excited to run into other Pennsylvanians that we can hardly contain ourselves within our own skin.

It’s weird.

Dustin corroborates, though. He’s the only other person I know who left PA never planning to come back and then came back, and we spent awhile swapping stories and comparing notes. He told me that there’s a Steelers bar in just about every town in the South, and that all of the friends he made in his time there happened to originate in PA. We grinned and patted our people on the back for taking over the world, and sheepishly admitted how happy we are to be back in Western PA.

There’s no explanation for it. Pennsylvania is crumbling, old, and economically depressed. There are no jobs and no money. And yet we come back, and we come back, and we come back; and when we don’t, it seems that we wish we could. As Dustin put it, “If there were jobs here for people with degrees, I don’t think anyone would ever leave. They would just stay here forever.”

I think it has to do with the land itself. There’s something in the soil here that fills you. I find myself looking around as I drive, drawing a deep breath when I lift up mine eyes to the hills, and relaxing into a surge of the peace that only comes from being home. The land grabs you, here. When I agreed with Hillori, long ago, that I would die for my native soil, I meant that in the most literal possible sense. I’d rather hold a handful of Pennsylvania dirt than own an acre of land anywhere else.

Maybe I ate too much of it as a kid. But it’s in the bone, and coming home has brought it out in the blood. When I moved back in October, I thought, panicky, that I wouldn’t stay for long. I didn’t want to be trapped here. I wanted broader horizons and more dramatic vistas. But instead of prison I found freedom, and while I’m still open to living elsewhere in the world, I find myself happier and happier to be here, and minding less and less the thought of a long-term stay. Bigger horizons and broader vistas are just a plane or a road trip away, and I can’t wait to indulge my wanderlust. But the best part of wandering is knowing that at the end, you get to come home. Home is what keeps the wanderer from getting lost.

I don't remember ever being this happy. I love the land, I love my faith, I have two good churches, I have friends, I like my jobs, I'm poor as dirt but scraping by, I'm settling more and more into myself and learning that I don't have anything to prove. I had to leave for awhile, and I had to suffer those growing pains that form the lines around a person's mouth and eyes and are called experience...and I had to come back home. It was the best decision I ever made. I love my life, and I can't wait to see what it brings me next.

* * *

I am holding half an acre
torn from the map of michigan
and folded in this scrap of paper
is the land i grew in

think of every town you've lived in
every room you lay your head
and what is it that you remember

do you carry every sadness with you
every hour your heart was broken
every night the fear and darkness
lay down with you

a man is walking on the highway
a woman stares out at the sea
and light is only now just breaking

so we carry every sadness with us
every hour our hearts were broken
every night the fear and darkness
lay down with us

but i am holding half an acre
torn from the map of michigan
i am carrying this scrap of paper

that can crack the darkest sky wide open
every burden taken from me
every night my heart unfolding
my home

~Hem, "Half Acre"