Feeling Home

I am at the time in my life where I should be settled. I am supposed to have dug in my heels, planted my feet down in one spot and grown roots. I am supposed to have figured out where, and what, home is. I have never felt “home”. Home has always been my mother’s place, or my sister’s place, but never MY place.
When I bought my house, I told myself, “Finally, this is it. This is HOME. Here is where I will raise my last child. Here is where I will die.” Now, years later, I am looking beyond the privacy fence, searching the horizon for whatever befalls me. I saw this child leaving, searching out his new home with the Army; for myself, I saw a new home and a life reborn in the Sonoran Desert.
What was prompting this migration? How could I possibly give up this contented, sedate way of life here in Arkansas? I could spew forth several reasons, all of them perfectly sane, all of them perfectly crazy. I am looking homeward. I was looking for the inner calm I once found in the desert.
I discovered the desert when my parents moved to Tucson in the mid-70’s. They were pioneers – they left behind the Ozarks where the family had spread through all subsequent generations. When I visited, I immediately fell in love. I loved the heat, the scorpions, the cacti. These things spoke to me of hearth and home. I never wanted to leave. I wanted to die there. But while I did not die, I did leave only to return. I wanted my children to fall in love with this strange, alien topography as quickly as I did. They, too, enjoyed wandering through the sand dunes, crouching under the giant arms of the Saguaro, avoiding the long, spiny arms of the Ocotillo. They quickly became “desert rats” browning in the sun much like the bread I used to bake browned in the oven. Baking their souls, as it were, to a healthy golden glow.
There has always been something about barren, deserted landscape that appealed to me. Somehow all tension and stress were stripped from my carcass, leaving bare bones, bleached white, resembling a cow skull stripped clean by vultures. This sandy, extreme world. You either love it or you hate it. No in-between, no indecisiveness. This is its appeal. It’s an “all or nothing” kind of place.
So why did I leave Tucson? Love, marriage, still seeking a place to call home were the magnets pulling me back to the Ozarks. Once here, I achieved success in all I attempted, but still, I had no place that felt “home”. As I aged, I realized that “home” was not “where” I was physically but “where” I was mentally.
My mental persona has never left the desert. I am still there on days when the 125-degree summer sun scorches everything into brittle gingersnaps. I am still there when the night temperatures drop into the 30’s and you pray for midday. Pray for relief from the extremes. What am I seeking through these prayers?
Am I seeking justification for these decisions that took me back and forth across this country? Do I want approval for the major life changes caused by the decisions I made? I think I am seeking a new life, perhaps a refreshing purpose to my life. A return to my mental home. Leaving behind a house in a land suffocating with green for another house surrounded by cacti and scorpions.
Once there, settling into this new life, this new perspective, would I stay? Did I find what I was seeking? Or will I, after a few years, again feel that tug, that yearning to search alien places? I don’t know. I should let that inner calm I found in the desert pull my soul down through my feet and root it in sand. I must allow this calm to flicker and grow in the heat, allow the monsoons to drench it with rain, and inhale deeply of desert flowers in the springtime. My soul should wax and wane with the seasons, having time to become fixed, rooted in permanence. But will I?
There will be adventures to come and other souls to meet. Will this happen? Where will it happen? When will it happen? I don’t know. I just hope and trust that one single experience will be strong enough to make me feel like I am home.