The crisp, golden prairie flashes past the window as we head east. Colorado mountains in the rearview, my heart still with my kids. Across Kansas, the rolling fields dusted with ice unfold as far as one can see. In Missouri the green begins return, the rock barriers stacked aside the highways, the trees grow slightly denser. We turn south. 

South to where the energy of my body matches the earth of that place called home. Have you felt that before? When a place just feels the same as yourself?

Through Tennessee, the white piles aside the highway- not snow this time- but the memory of the cotton harvest from this past fall. We sing Sweet Home Alabama as we drive. The cotton fields grow wider, rolling out deep against the winter sky clear. Touches of new growth just graze the surface of the southern dirt. We wind over the great river, the Mississippi, deep and full of history. The colors are changing. I can feel we’re almost there. 

There- the strobe effect of the forest stands zip past the window in a syncopated beat. Whoosh, whoosh. The sky is a bit more pink here, the air a bit more blue. I cannot explain its magic to y’all. The hush through the trees, dense and full of mystery and yells from other times. The Tennessee River- the Singing River, that is- dances under the long bridge we cross welcoming us home as the hawks fly over and sit on fence posts watching over waiting fields in January. 

She is sleeping, my northern spot in Alabama. Though the kudzu and privet are still green, along with a lot of the grasses and others that refuse their rest. The stark white bark of some trees create a skeletal glow in clips of the forest. All year round, she tells her stories by drumbeat. The very drumbeat that mimics my heartbeat. I am alive. I breathe her in. This part of the world that my Cherokee ancestors lived, where my Celtic ancestors built homes and carved out a life in these hills. My people are from a lot of places, a lot of places indeed, but here is where I have returned. I recognize this mysteriously breathtaking place. I heard her haunting call through the barred owl.

Just a few miles from home, just a stretch off the base of the Appalachians, we look at each other and smile. Home.