Growing up, I absorbed the Southern obsession with place, and place can seem to me somehow an extension of the self. If I am made of red clay and black river water and white sand and moss, that seems natural to me.

Frances Mayes, Under the Tuscan Sun, 266

Send me out into another life
lord because this one is growing faint
I do not think it goes all the way.

W.S. Merwin, Words from a Totem Animal

I would not be surprised to find that I am made of river silt and humidity, coming as I do from the Arkansas river valley. The thought of tiny whiskered catfish moving slowly through my depths seems natural rather than freakish.

I was born in the South, and lived there for 28 years and 3 months. For about half of those I was intensely aware of the fact, although I do not know when or how that awareness began. Some of my favorite hours are those spent reading through southern histories and biographies, and wading through regional cookbooks. My favorite journey for the past five years has been the 350 miles from Little Rock to New Orleans, through the lowlands and little towns, and my favorite thing to do there has been to sit on a low platform in the Barataria Preserve and watch the alligators float by. Once, one slowly surfaced about 10 feet in front of me, and we sat and looked at each other for an hour. Eventually, he turned and floated on; I turned and left.

And now I have left all of it, probably for good. I never meant to live there as long as I did, although for the last five years I was reconciled to it to the point of thinking that I didn't really want to leave. I assumed I would be homesick, and so went through a strange pre-homesickness during the last weeks before we moved. Since we have been here, I haven't had a twinge. Rather, there's been relief to be living elsewhere twelve years after I thought I would, a settling into something I had forgotten I wanted. I wonder if this is it for me, if I'll become one of the North Toward Home southerners who only visits and never moves back, or if I'll develop a hole inside that can only be filled with red clay.

Ask me again in January.