Tribal Wanderer

"The snowflakes fall, as winter calls, and time just seems to fly...Is it the loneliness in me that makes me want to cry?" - Whispering Pines, by Johnny Horton

Although I've always said that home is wherever I hang my stethoscope, lately I've begun to wonder if that is true. My entire life I have been the one who leaves, and I have liked it that way; jobs, towns, schools, groups, friends, organizations. I pack my little red suitcase like I used to pack my little red wagon, and I ease on down the road. New experiences call to me like the sirens called Odysseus; countries I have not seen, skills I have not mastered, wines I have not tasted. I have always viewed my life as incredibly short, and in my heart I know that one hundred years will not be enough time to experience all that I want to experience. I'm secretly hoping the Hindus are right and I get several lives, because there are so many things I will not get to do in this one. Like the clever north wind in the movie Chocolat and the people it influenced, I disappear from pictures, lives and memory. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am a tribal wanderer. And now, much to my own surprise, I am about to wander home.

Is there something deeper in us than we know that defines home? Something that calls us home on a cellular level? Something that is always there, no matter how far away we travel, no matter how long we stay away? What is it that calls me back to this place? They are my earliest sense memories, but is that it? With each passing year, I find myself less willing to spend any time or energy on experiences, places or people that don't feel right. Who among us really knows how much time we have allotted to us? Why spend it in the wrong place? No place else has ever smelled right, although they smell good in their own right. Other places have felt good, and I've enjoyed them. But they have not been home.

For there is something about the pine trees there that looks right to me. The way the top of the Western Hemlock tilts over slightly, branches held at honest Charlie Brown angles. The way the mist hangs in the air and the way the sea smells when I stand beside it. The way dark falls early in the winter, wrapping me in a blanket of night as I read the thoughts of centuried others, and try to write my way into, and out of, my own. The slick of the roads as I drive to the coast, a plaid thermos of hazelnut coffee on the car seat beside me, singing the Johnny Horton songs my grandparents used to sing, and that I now play out into the darkness of heaven in hopes they might hear. The smell of a smokehouse full of fish caught that day, moss on the fallen trees on a wooded path that looks like a dinosaur might wander through. The first strawberries of June, the first snowfall in late Autumn. The first time I felt I might want to stay somewhere, and the first time I admitted it.