Place of Belonging

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I’ve heard that people who move a lot as children will have trouble putting down roots as adults, even when they want to.  Despite the fact that I’d like to eventually belong somewhere, I’m afraid I fall into this category.  I have wanderlust up to my ears.

We counted it up once.  I think it was something like a dozen moves by the time I was a teenager, not including the four months we spent living in a bus, en route to … somewhere, I’m sure.  And I've moved a few times since.

Despite the fact that I have lived in Georgia the longest, I don’t get that feeling some people have for their home state.  We never claimed it as our own, not really.  We were Yankees in the South.

To this day, when people ask where I am from, I do not know how to answer.  There is an awkward pause while I consider what to say.  A few highlights, maybe?

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I was born in Miami.

I vaguely remember life in Florida.  I remember almost drowning in that swimming pool.  I remember sitting in that short spiky stuff they like to call grass.  I can just barely recall my grandparent’s first boat, but maybe that’s because I’ve seen the photographs.  And I remember chasing my best friend Jon around the backyard with toads twice the size of my head.

Then we lived in Oregon.

We lived in Bandon first, on the campus of The Great Commission School.  I remember Teacher Tom.  Once I put my jacket on upside down and backwards, and he made me take it off and wear it correctly. This stands out in my memory because it was particularly difficult to put it on that way in the first place.

After that came McMinnville and the small, white house we rented from Dr. Dunn.

I remember Al’s Ice Cream Shop.  It was an old-timey ice cream parlor, with little booths and a monkey in the back who wore a red cap on his head.  They put tiny ceramic animals on the ice cream, which was my favorite part.

I remember the trees on the college campus nearby.  They had the broadest, lowest limbs.  You could hide up in them for hours, like lying in hammocks.

I remember the orchard in the back yard.  My sister used to sneak back there and eat the filbert nuts, despite the fact that we weren’t allowed because they had worms in them.  

I remember Sara who lived down the street.  We always called her Sara Down the Street, as if that was her last name.  That’s all we knew about her.  She lived with this boy who would ride shirtless past our house in a big truck, and scream out the window.  This was particularly disturbing to me as a child.

I remember the flight of the chimney swifts down into that old brick house.  We sat on the hood of our car and watched them go.

The most exotic thing I remember about McMinnville was the lions.  Did you know the roar of a full-grown lion can be heard up to five miles away?  We would feel the ground quake in the early morning.  Then, one day while out walking, we stumbled across their pen.  There were at least two or three of them, just standing there staring back at us.

Then we moved across country (not because of the lions).

It took us a week to relocate to Georgia.  My dad bought a second old school bus, gutted it, and set up our living room inside.  We rode in style on those old beige couches, no seat belts.  And I don’t remember being pulled over for it once.  

Georgia was an entirely different world.  For whatever reason, we decided to be farmers.  We bought goats and chickens, planted veggies, and joined a co-op so we could collect five gallon buckets of wheat berries and make our own bread.  We weren't cut out for it.  The goats frequently escaped from their pens, and their milk always tasted like bamboo from the forest out back.  My dad envisioned corn fields; we planted potatoes and never found them.

The first house we lived in belonged to my grandparents.  That was the house of our greatest adventures as children.  We built forts all over the property, put up a giant rope swing that carried us out over the pond, and collected stray pets.  Whenever I have dreams about childhood, this is the house where my dreams take place.

Since then, I've moved another five times and am about to leave for Denmark.

So you can understand my dilemma when asked where I am from, a question that does not require the place of origin as much as place of belonging.

Should I just claim somewhere I've been and pass it off as my answer?  It would be the simplest thing to do.

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But if truth be told, I think I'm a nomad at heart.