We stayed at the apartment of one of our friends. She's more like family, really - one of those friends around whom we feel more like a relative than a guest. We laughed and told her all our inside jokes that are too embarrassing to tell anyone here yet, and we hugged and hugged and hugged. Jamie's southern accent came roaring back to life in its native habitat and down home colloquialisms were uttered and enjoyed by all, along with margaritas at East Nashville's Rose Pepper.
The apartment where we spent our nights was not more than a mile from the first place I ever lived in Nashville. The train tracks run behind the place - close enough to wake us up and even to be annoying but for those two days it felt more like a nostalgic country song... as did the brown grass and trees and leaves. Football was in the air, and you could feel basketball too coming fast to accompany us through winter. How a place stays the same strikes me and touches me. I understand what it means to have your being wrapped up in a place, in the streets - the cracks of a sidewalk or the angle of a stop sign or the hills (or lack thereof).
bell hooks has a new book out called Belonging: A Culture of Place. She, a visionary and prophetic academic returned to Kentucky after thirty years away. She quotes Scott Russell Sanders in capturing the sentiment that at least the three of us share: "It is rare for any of us, by deliberate choice, to sit still and weave ourselves into a place, so that we know the wildflowers and rocks and politicians, so that we recognize faces wherever we turn, so that we feel a bond with everything in sight. The challenge, these days, is to be somewhere as opposed to nowhere, actually to belong to some particular place, to invest oneself in it, draw strength and courage from it, to dwell not simply in a career or a bank account but in a community" (67-68).
It is an accident of the universe that bell hooks coincided with my first trip back to Nashville, but it has me wondering - where is home? Tennessee? Kansas? I don't think it's here, where the mountains in their rugged beauty block the possibilities along the horizon of somewhere else. Here is a season but there is another place where we will live seasons into years.
In the meantime, I am renewed and refreshed and infused with a jolt of confidence, having spoken with passion and pride about VDS, having soaked up eye contact, having reveled in memories, having been immersed in love and love and love.
Among the home-like events over the weekend:
Accompanying dear friends to the city championship junior high football game as they supported a young member of their church family
Breakfast with the dear Viki Matson, complete with catching up on news and dreams
A swing by the old West Nashville home place and the Humane Society where Betsy and Wyatt used to live
A "quick" hour long chat with Sharon Howell, mentor, fellow Kansan, and leader extraodinaire
Tennessee sunshine and the Nashville skyline
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