The Home You Make and Keep.

Like most couples Jason and I have fantasized a lot about moving. Especially to New Orleans. God we loved that place. In all of the places I've been in my life--which isn't the longest list but enough to compare and contrast--no place has ever felt so immediately like home. At least once a week we talk about what would happen if we moved there. What we would do and where we would live and the kind of place Adelyn would grow up knowing like the back of her hand. But I haven't spent a lot of time in New Orleans. New York is a little different. I've lived there long enough cumulatively to really know the place, at least to know the difference between living and visiting. And as awesome as I think it would be to have a baby raised in such a diverse and exciting and inspiring place, I know it's just not feasible. (And an even bigger part of me knows now, after years of battling a long-harbored desire to be immersed in a city, that it's not me anymore. If it ever was at all.)

On Saturday Jason and I got to talking about how weird it is to have lived in the same place your whole life. Jason has lived in Tennessee since he was born. I might as well have, it's all I know and remember from my adolescence. We weren't complaining about our place of origin at all--by weird we just meant the choiceless-ness in it. Where you grow up. The place you call home. You're born somewhere or brought somewhere and then, suddenly, that's where you live. And then that's where your loved ones are. And then it's not just your family but your new life, too, the loved ones you've added and created along the way. And that's just all you know, and leaving becomes a complicated, sticky, often-painful idea, no matter if you want a change or not. And then you stop questioning it--especially when there's a new life and a new home to be created--and it's just where you are, period. And you're seeing the whole thing from someone else's eyes, a baby who's seeing everything--the fields and the trees and the people and the houses--for the first time, and you know that this is what she'll always think of as home, too. You gave it to her. She didn't choose it.

There are things I don't love about Tennessee. But there are infinitely more reasons why I've stopped making a list of all the things I don't love.

What I do love is that my parents, Jason's parents, grandparents, and sister all live minutes away. (And when we want to escape, my sister and two of my best friends are in New York, my other best friend is in LA, soon to be Australia). And that you wave at people you don't know when you catch their attention, and they wave back, and they mean it. (I've tried this, in habit, in other parts of the world. Doesn't always go over so well.) I love that Jason and I sit outside on our deck every night and there are too many stars in the sky to count.

And I love that on weekends, we drive to nearby towns and go to things like the Fiddlers Jamboree, like we did Saturday, and listen to kids half our age flat pick guitar with skill that sends goosebumps down my arms. And we can eat fried pickles and lemonade and buy hand-made Native American dreamcatchers for Adelyn's room. I love that Adelyn hears music so much that at five months old she could sit for hours, in the heat, and listen, happily, feet and arms moving to the music, without making a single unhappy peep.