Tuesday Chatter-Becoming Real

I managed to skip last Friday's Rambles. Sorry. I was away from home all day at a Christmas Fair, and managing to sell a book or two. I meant to come home and post a Ramble, but was just too tired. I was glad I did set up at the Fair, though. Saw and talked to some people I hadn't seen for a while - a long while for some of them. Saw another vendor who remembered me from several years back at another event. Saw many beautiful hand-crafted items. Reminded me again how sadly lacking I am in the talent of producing pretties. So happy there are those who excel in that department. I try to produce words that interest people, though. The column below chronicles my journey to being willing to expose those words to any who cared to read them. I am thankful for those who take that chance.

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My mother would tell a story about my baby days when I must have been around eighteen months. We would visit a neighbor or relative's house. After a few hours my toddler self would apparently grow tired and try to reach my cap and coat, crying to go home. Did my feelings of being 'out of step' with my surroundings most of the time begin there? Through the years I always felt more secure at home with my family. Which to me is a good thing. We all need somewhere to feel safe.
    My two-years-older sister was a fearful child. She was very reluctant to attend school alone when she started first grade while we lived in Alabama. By then I had become more social, so the next fall when she began second grade, though I was only five, mother enrolled me in first grade. I doubt I had much understanding about being younger than my classmates then. But that changed by the end of the school year when we moved and my Georgia first grade teacher early promoted me to second grade. So when I entered third grade I was only six years old, effectively a little more than two years younger than all my classmates.
    My family moved a lot. I'd attended eight or so different schools by the time I entered high school. Added to that, my dad being a sharecropper and mill worker, we were always among the poor children. In actual fact, since this was during the country's recovery from what is called 'the great depression', most of the student body at the schools came from poor families.
    I expect being so much younger than my school contemporaries was the main reason I identified with Henry David Thoreau's, "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears the beat of a different drummer." Later in life I resisted feeling I needed to be like everyone else. I'm afraid I often escaped actual life through reading, when I wanted to write. Only as an older adult was I brave enough to seek out other writers, reveal my 'real' self, through my own writing, in my books, this column.

Friday Rambles-Dual Citizenship

The below column written several years ago is one of my favorites. I suppose because it sort of centers on my beloved Tennessee. I was an adult when I first came to live in Tennessee. But  it kind of felt like home from the start. I've written in other places about a family story which I can't verify and which might explain why I feel about it as i do. If you believe that the places our forbears lived is imprinted on our DNA. Other explanations abound. Such as an unhappy childhood so a relocation might be sought. But my childhood was fairly happy, even though we were poor. As a child I figured Georgia would always be my home and felt no desire that life be otherwise. My daughter has returned to Georgia to live now. Perhaps she'll stay. Or not. Life often brings changes we never anticipated. If someone had told me I'd spend the far greater portion of my life in Tennessee and eventually write novels I would have been amazed. But so it happened.
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    I was born in the state of Georgia. So I have to say I’m a Georgia native even though I have lived in Tennessee more than three times as long as I did in Georgia. Similar to a person who holds citizenship in two different countries, I call it ‘dual citizenship.’ Probably a lot of people fit that description. My late husband was born in Virginia but his family moved to Kingsport when he was two years old and he grew up here. He served in the Navy for four years but Kingsport was still home. After the Navy he lived in South Carolina for about a year and then Georgia, where we met, for a couple of years. But the major part of his life was in Tennessee.
    A writer friend was born in Kentucky but her family moved to Kingsport when she was very young. She grew up, married a Tennessean and has continued to live in Kingsport. They visit Kentucky far more often than I visit Georgia, since their daughter lives there. So she could plausibly claim to be a Kentucky and a Tennessee native. Though I doubt that would be acceptable on the myriad forms we all have to deal with in daily life.
    Another writer friend was born in Southwest Virginia but her family moved to Tennessee when she was barely a teenager.  She was graduated from high school here, married, had two sons. She returned to Virginia and lived there until about twelve years ago when she moved back to Tennessee to be near her family. Most likely more than a few folks in these adjoining corners of Tennessee and Virginia have followed a similar path, in both directions.
    My own daughter was born in Atlanta, Georgia during the two years we lived there after I married. But she lived in Kingsport, graduated from Dobyns Bennett, attended Maryville College and ETSU and worked in Kingsport. She always wanted to go back to Georgia and eventually she did move to Atlanta. About six years was enough for her. She returned to Tennessee and seems quite satisfied to be back. Like myself, she’s happy enough to acknowledge that she was born in Georgia, but these Tennessee mountains are home.