You might call it irony, the way I am sitting on a couch in Spain,
sorting out my future the same way I did thirteen years ago in North
Dakota when I promised myself I'd never move far away.
At fifteen, the future was lined with a handful of cards ripped from Campus Life magazine. I checked the boxes carefully, making sure not to leave errant ink next to the name of any college that wasn't in
Minnesota or a Dakota. I wasn't even open to free info from either coast, so
sure recruiters would try to rip me out of the Midwest with their shiny
brochures and scholarship offers. And when I finally made a decision,
at seventeen years old, it was exactly 502 miles away. Not far enough
for my classmates, who all claimed they'd blow this dump after
graduation. Too far for me, the only one who felt safe inside the edges
of our tiny world, a bell jar safely covering the radius around my
family's farm.
The 4500 miles between North
Dakota and Madrid don't feel as wide now as
those first 500, that eight-hour drive carving a sharp divide between
childhood and adulthood. I thought then that choosing anything new meant
severing the old--and not only severing, but hacking to bloody pieces
with a dull knife. I left my parents' home--a stray sunflower in the
middle of a wide open wheat field, as if someone dropped the wrong
seeds, magically harvested a ranch-style earthberm on the prairie. I had
no idea where our land started and stopped, only that I was somehow
included in the "our," that I was invited to return to the pastures and
tree rows and gardens forever, even if I hadn't helped with the planting
and harvesting.
When a college friend enlisted in the
army, she distributed her five most precious books to friends for
safekeeping. The rest of her possessions were sold, trashed, donated. I
opened an envelope once to find a letter handwritten in the margins of
pages she'd torn from an Emily Dickinson volume. This was a great
mystery to me, having grown up in the same place where my father has
spent most of his nearly-sixty years, which is also where his father spent an entire eighty-six. My closet shelves have buckled beneath the books I've been stashing since graduation. I've never yet had to change my permanent address.
And
yet I live across the sea, doing things I never anticipated I would be
brave enough to do. That's not exactly true, though--that I am doing
anything because I'm courageous. The truth is that the sense of
belonging to a place is the weight allowing the balloon to dance in the
sky. The number of miles between two spaces means less than having a
space to measure distances from. And this, I think, is why it's impossible to completely cut the strings, to fly haphazardly until tangling in a tree. I
am free to go anywhere because my heart is tethered securely to the one
place I can always call home.
Mom, Dad, thanks for letting me fly so far this time. Next year, we'll do this together. Merry Christmas.
1 comment:
I am so looking forward to having you back home next year, and can't wait. You will always have a place here at home at the farm.
My heart bursts with pride and joy with how you have grown into such a beautiful woman! Love you so much!
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