So many times I've written about ecology, literally the study of homes, emphasizing the influences of the local on all life--not just humans and animals, but plants and single-celled creatures. Only in poetry, though, do I insert my own localized experiences, mostly because my own view of home grows out of multiple locations.
When folks ask about my hometown, I usually say something general and superficial like "I lived all over the place." But really I suspect those folks are asking something beyond, "Where do you live?" since a home means more than that (at least I think so and even argue that about our "sense of place" in my research).
So what means home to me? Even though most of us haven't lived there since 1968, my family thinks of West Virginia as home, so much so that my Stepdad bought subscriptions of West Virginia Magazine for all of us. And I certainly write about West Virginia in poems looking at my father's first church and the accidents I had there--falling off stages, running into bricks, meeting a motorcycle at a street corner.
But when I think about WV, it seems more like a box of memories than a home. The house we lived in there feels cold and hard in my mind, with cracked wood floors, a sagging mattress shared with an older sister, and tight walls that seemed to block out the sun. If the tiny WV town had been my home, I think, how could I have grown?
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