When I was 8 years old we left Augusta, Georgia, the only home I'd ever known, and moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. Knoxville is a lovely city, in the foothills of East Tennessee, very close to the mountains. Many nice people live in Knoxville. It has a fine university, and many thriving businesses.
However, I never felt like it was really my home. I always wondered why. I lived in East Tennessee from 1971-1982, and 1985-1993.
Left, me sledding that first winter. I had never seen snow before.
I was flipping channels not long ago and I watched a few minutes of a program on the local public broadcasting station here. I cannot recall the name of it. It was almost over. What sticks in my head is a middle-aged woman standing in front of a river somewhere in rural Georgia and saying words to this effect: for the people who lived here and used this river as a water source, the river became part of their bodies.
I was profoundly moved by that. I sat in silence and thought about that for a while.
Suddenly it made perfect sense to me, why Tennessee never felt like my home.
My ancestors have lived in Georgia, most of them, for many generations. They came from Ireland, Scotland, England, France, and other places, but they settled here in Georgia and farmed. For generations my people have lived in Georgia -- eating food grown in this soil, drinking water from the creeks and rivers, and effectively building their bodies out of this place. Literally.
Georgia became part of them.
When they died, their bodies went back into the soil and became part of the process.
This is so profound to me. My parents loved East Tennessee but they were also happy to get back to Georgia in 1991, after 20 years. An old man at Dad's Kiwanis meeting said when he saw Dad for the first time in 20 years "Where have you been, Tony?!" He always thought that was touching and hilarious.
I am so glad at the end of his life Dad returned to the area where he had begun his life.
The hold that North Georgia has on me is powerful.
left, one of my gardens in early summer
When my mother is gone, I will still have this place. I will still be nurtured by this place and it will feel as though I'm supposed to stay here.
When my father died, he was cremated. My brother and I took his ashes to scatter on a beautiful November day, months after he died. We went to the countryside outside of Augusta, where Dad's friend Roy owned land that Dad loved to visit and hunt on. Dad was a city man, a banker, but he also loved the outdoors. He loved hunting and fishing. When I was a kid I never really understood why he would come home from work, change clothes, make a drink, and spend at least 30 minutes just walking around outside, looking at the yard, the garden, the trees, just whatever was outside. He calmed down. He un-stressed.
Now I totally understand that.
We put Dad's ashes in a swiftly moving creek and he became, once again, part of that land, just like his forbears. It felt right.
Now I go outside to unwind, too.
Sometimes I take Lola outside on the leash and just stand there, contemplating nothing except the sky, the birds, the trees. My backyard is filled with a lot of trees and needs a lot of landscaping but however unkempt it is, it soothes me.
My ancestors lived and died here in North Georgia. The land was part of their bodies and it soothed their souls.
I hope and pray in this era of technology that we do not lose the connection we have to the land of our ancestors. We are not only what we eat but WHERE we eat. Our DNA contains this place, and also contains the DNA of all those who came before and had to live off this land, and if we listen to our instincts hopefully we will not lose that connection to the land and the old ways.
I love this double rainbow in this shot looking down my street. I always view rainbows as signs of encouragement from God..
“We do not see nature with our eyes, but with our understandings and our hearts.” –William Hazlett
“Earth and sky, woods and fields, lakes and rivers, the mountain and the sea, are excellent schoolmasters, and teach of us more than we can ever learn from books.” –John Lubbock
