Read the whole series on home here.
There are so many ways to share where we’re from, to tell the stories of who we are, and where and how and when we are home.
I came into this world cradled in the Colorado Rockies, was baptized in a tiny papermill town in Louisiana, spent my childhood years in Fayetteville, NC and San Antonio, TX. We moved every few years, and I remember well the familiarity of packing and unpacking, saying goodbyes and preparing for hellos, anticipating the adventure of exploring new places and friendships while grieving beloved places and people left behind. Encountering different sights, sounds, tastes, smells, creatures, histories, and rhythms of life in each place we called home. I came to know that home is made, and remade, and can be multiple. Home can be ephemeral, and fleeting, and also endure.
One of the first songs I learned by heart was “Wildflowers,” by Trio. I wore the cassette tape out, singing with Dolly Parton, Emmylou Harris, and Linda Ronstadt: When a flower grows wild, it can always survive; wildflowers don’t care where they grow.
More recently, I heard the herbalist Rosemary Gladstar say, “Plants have no choice oftentimes in where they land, and yet wherever they land they are going to thrive and grow the best they can.” I came to know home as freedom to grow, thriving and growing wherever I land, the best I can. Turtle-like, we can carry home with us; wildflower-like, we can find or make home wherever we land.
I grew up mostly in the South, but wasn’t from the South, even though southern lingers in me, in particular ways. Y’all rolls off my tongue, as does Honey and Ma’am. My tastebuds live for boiled peanuts (pronounced: baawld), and muscadine and scuppernong grapes, Bluebell ice cream before it was sold across state lines, crawfish boils and cornbread and gumbo and grits, all washed down with tea so sweet it makes your teeth hurt. (I cannot talk about home–cannot imagine home or be home or come home or return home or make home or welcome someone else home–without talking about food. Ideally, while sharing it.) Home lingers, for better and worse. We can leave home, but home leaves a residue. We can make home in and with the unfamiliar, but familiarity is part of knowing we are home.
I did not grow up in Iowa, but it was the land of my mom’s birth and becoming, and I grew up returning for visits each summer. It was the land I knew most intimately, and most consistently. A place we returned, a place of return. As a child I came to associate Iowa with fireflies and barefoot evenings outside and chigger bites from stretching out under the stars, picking violets and foraging for morels, my grandmother rolling out noodle dough and garage sale hopping, hearing nighttime train whistles through windows open to the hope of a cool breeze. Sweet corn and tomatoes bursting on the vine, beans snapped on the front porch, raspberries still warm from the sun, biscuits hot from the oven and spread thick with elderberry jelly.
Each place I have made home has nourished me, but place itself can never offer the experience of belonging–being known, held, and loved–that is, that makes, that welcomes us home. When I started to recognize my queerness in high school–queer desire and genderqueerness–I had the visceral, sustained sense of everything about me mis-fitting, un-belonging. Not home in my body, not home in my longings, not home with my peers, not home at home. I was without any access, yet, to the revolutionary poets and liberative lineages and radical collectivities and queer theories that would eventually welcome me home into, as Ashon Crawley calls it, “the radical potentiality of otherwise possibility that is queerness.”
I found refuge in the night sky, encountered home among, beneath, the stars. Their company transformed my loneliness into satisfying solitude. The unimaginable expanse of spacetime and spaciousness still grounds and frees me. Harriet Tubman also turned to the sky for “celestial wayfinding,” as Leah Penniman calls it. I feel home whenever I can find the moon, and when I am with others who want to wander outside to turn our faces in wonder at what my nibbling calls “the night Sun,” content to stretch out under the stars for hours.
“The love of place can sustain a life,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “and we usually talk as though it’s an unreciprocated love, a one-way street…The places love us back in how they steady and sustain us, teach us, shelter us, guide us, feed us.”
Home is companionship with others who sing and dream and enflesh stories of radical potential, otherwise possibility, wild love, futures born of fierce and tender care; home is the company of others who become our own healers, and who also know we can never heal on our own. After all, as Cara Page asks, what is our freedom if we don’t take care of each other.
In each place I have found home with friends who become lovers, and lovers who become friends, and friends who became kin and remain family to this day.
There are so many ways to share where we’re from, to tell the stories of who we are, and where and how and when we are home. In sorrow and sweetness, we thrive and grow, the best we can, wherever we land. I am part turtle, part wildflower, park sky, finding my way, making my way, home.
Anna Blaedel (they/them) is co-director at enfleshed, where they tend to the theopoetic intersections of spiritual, academic, and activist engagement. Anna chaplains University of Iowa students, and is a doctoral candidate in Theological and Philosophical Studies at Drew University’s Graduate Division on Religion. Waking before dawn, lingering in poetry, being an aunt, retreating to the woods or their basement woodshop, tending the garden, sharing silence, and feeding people delicious food are some of Anna’s favorite things.