Growed Up

One of my recent favorite blogs to read posted a picture of a Colorado sunset. That made me homesick for something I haven't known for a long time.

Sometimes I get called out on my childhood stories......"I grew up in Eastern Rural Colorado..." or, "I grew up in South Side Chicago....." or, Greeley, CO or Jennings, Sulfur, LA, or Kanankee, IL or Iowa.

All are true. So, where am I from?

All of those places and experiences shaped me in major and heartbreaking ways. Even when we move, I will call Iowa home. We moved to Iowa when I was 16. But sometimes, when I am driving home from the night classes at the rural campus I teach at, I get a pang of homesickness for the vast, yet anything but flat, open spaces of Eastern Colorado. The wide open sky, so little light pollution that you can actually see the stars (even the Milky Way), the clean smell of the wind, and how you can see trouble (both the metaphoric and the tornado kind) coming from miles away- even watch the devastation from a safe, yet beautiful distance. I miss the noise of wildlife and the quiet after a blizzard. The sunsets are so achingly beautiful that I cried at age 14 when I was told I had to go back to Illinois. You see, in that home I was loved, nurtured, and treated like a human being. Forever will the landscape surrounding that farmhouse be tied to who I am.

When I moved to Iowa I was on my way to being on my own. I met Dear Husband shortly after and a couple of years later we married and began a different life together that I had only known in brief encounters and on the ranch in Colorado. We made a home that makes its foundation on respect for each other and fostering our creative lives.

We are about to move again. Not next week or even in the next year, but it is impending and change is coming. We will be faced with the question yet again. We will say Iowa because it is simple and true. Iowa is very much woven into who we are now as a family. We will bring that with us. I will carry all of the places I've been in my heart.

Thank you for the memory.