At lunch today I was asked by an old friend if I considered Austin “home” now. Most people when they talk about the trips they typically take on the holidays say, “I’m going home to visit my parents,” but I do not. Of course, I didn’t feel I fit in where I grew up in northern Mississippi even when I was living there. Now, after having lived in three other cities in the United States along with a stint in France, I connect even less to the residents of the area, many of who live less than ten miles from the house where they grew up.

Strangely enough, even with this feeling of disconnection, I have been listening more to the music of the region, early Elvis, Johnny Cash, John Lee Hooker, music that for me evokes the culture that my family was embedded in, especially the farmers, who lived in their own brand of Southern Gothic. The music raises memories of long dark nights so humid the air seemed more suitable for fish to breathe than people, and yet despite the humidity, the dust thrown up by the passage of cars down a dirt road and hanging in the air sucked all the moisture out of the mouth, causing one to smack lips together in a vain effort to relieve the arid feeling. It was on those nights I discovered my love of astronomy, when I saw the Milky Way draw its lazy glow across the sky.

This past December, my father was buried in a cemetery in Covington, Tennessee, only a few miles from the farm where I spent those seemingly endless nights. Covington is a town that despite its proximity to Memphis has not yet been engulfed by the development that clings like dust to the spiderweb roads emanating from every city, and at the funeral for my Dad I lost count of the people who said they remembered me as a little boy on that farm in the summers. Then the conversation would turn to stories of my grandfather and his close relatives, illustrating for me in no uncertain terms how embedded in the area my family still is even thirty years after my grandfather died. I could feel the weight of the history, but it still is not home to me.

For even though the environment helped form who I became, it never felt comfortable or safe, especially when people were involved. For many, there’s no place like home, for me there was no place that felt like a home.

Through no action or fault of my parents, I could hardly wait for the time when I would move away from where I grew up, unknowing that what I sought would not be found elsewhere. Over the years, in the different places with the different people I have found some level of accommodation, a mode de vie, but I never found that place that was comfortable.

For me, it seems that the answer to the question posed by my friend, where is “home” for me, is the answer that I gave flippantly at the time. The old saying is that “home is where the heart is,” but for me home is between my ears, and I take it with me, from Memphis to Phoenix to Portland to Austin to Grenoble and back to Austin.

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