Home Is Where

I was in Florida this weekend, but before you get mad at me, it was a very short trip with time only for family. We spent Friday evening with my parents, Saturday with family on my mom’s side, Sunday with Jesse’s family, and Monday we were on the plane back to Wilmington. There’s this discount airline now that flies direct from Wilmington to Sanford for way cheap, and my mother’s uncle is not in great health, so we planned a quick trip down there for a little visit. I wish we had more time for friends, but it just didn’t work out that way this time.

At any rate, I write this to say that, after three years of living away from the state, I finally miss Florida.

When we left the Sunshine State, we intended to be in Wilmington for three years while I got my MFA, and then we were going to be off somewhere else. That “somewhere else” was not Florida. Now that the three years are up, we’re not heading anywhere else. We’re pretty settled here in North Carolina. And we still don’t have any plans to move back to Florida. I was thrilled to leave the state three years ago. I grew up there, and in my experience people either love or leave the state they grew up in. I was a leaver. The weather was too hot, the land too flat, the pines too scraggy, the sun too intense. When people ask where I’m from, I’m more likely to say “West Virginia,” or to say that I “grew up in” Florida, but not that I am from there.

But this trip back, I found I had more than just a little nostalgia for Florida. There are things about the state I really miss. Like the birds. There are birds everywhere there. Sandhill cranes. Herons. Egrets. They’re all over the place, and they’re gorgeous. And the lakes. There’s so much water. And the clouds, the way they pile themselves so tall and imposing. The afternoon thunderstorms, and the lightning. The orange groves. The way everything grows so big and so quickly. The color of the grass and how it’s so thick it can be difficult to walk on.

There’s a lot about Wilmington that reminds me of Florida. We’ve got the beach, the laid-back coastal lifestyle. There’s the sandy soil and the fireants and the mosquitoes (though not nearly as many). But there is some quality that is simply not there. Here there is an undertone of South, and there the undertone is something different, something that seems uniquely Florida.

Jesse and I both grew up in Florida. We met there, we dated there, we married there. We went to college there. I knew the back roads, the quickest way to get from Maitland to UCF, when the speed limits changed. But as much as we knew about Orlando, there was always something new to discover. There was always a neighborhood we hadn’t been in, a dozen restaurants we hadn’t tried. And there are memories all over that city, all over that state. There are nearly 20 years of memories there.

Last year when we visited, I felt nostalgic, but this year I felt something closer to homesick, which surprised me quite a bit. I still don’t think I want to move back, but there is part of me that longs to. There’s part of me that has finally acknowledged that Florida was home, that Florida is much more to me than just the state where I used to live. I am proud of the state, and I feel affection toward it.

The more I write about West Virginia, the more I realize that it is home. And that Florida is home. And that North Carolina is home. I know that sounds contradictory, but each one is something different for me, and I feel at home in each place, and I miss certain things about each place when I’m not there.

I tried to think of a way to end this, of some thought to wrap it up, to make this all come together and make sense. But there is none. I suppose I feel like I’m divided into thirds today, one part for each home, always missing two while living with one.