You can get there from here, though

there’s no going home.

Natasha Trethewey, from “Theories of Time and Space“

In her poem, Theories of Time and Space, Natasha Trethewey describes her experience going home to Gulfport, Mississippi. Trethewey’s words ask me to consider what it means to go home. Having been born in Louisville, Kentucky, on the Ohio River, and lived there for my first eighteen years, going home holds special significance. Home is not a place from which I ran. It is a place to which I return.

Trethewey provides directions home. Where to turn. The landmarks that will appear along the way. How far things are. How long it will take. I appreciate that clarity. I have never had a map that laid out a particular direction for life. My roots ran deep, yet I knew I needed to go. Home would always be there. I moved to the Pacific Northwest, with the smell of pine needles beckoning. I moved to Austin, Texas, with an acceptance letter to graduate school. I moved to Washington, DC, with a good job. I moved to Cincinnati — close but not home — returning to the familiarity of the Ohio River. I moved to Miami with my husband less than month after getting married. I now live in Atlanta where we bought a home.

Home is poetry and prose. Home is about the importance of dead ends and the comfort of shrimp boat rigging when the skies are threatening. It is about the parts of us that remain throughout the journey and the pictures of us that stay when we leave. It is about buried mangrove swamps and tomes of memories. Trethewey cautions not to carry too much of the past, which seems helpful in a forward-thinking-forgiveness-inspiring-grateful-living way. She understands the complexity of home with the stubborn fog of memory that both haunts and comforts, the silent truth that hangs and connects, and the letters and receipts that live. I have always been able to find directions that lead away from — or to the next — home. This poem suggests how to return home. It gives me coordinates for my questions. It explains why home is always where I return when I don’t know my way. It knows my why and I am.

Trethewey celebrates the details of home as familiar and essential through a lens that includes geography, but asks us to think deeply about lessons and landmarks, blessings and wounds, what we carry and what we leave behind. She marks experience as significant. I believe that to be true with my entire being. She tells the story of home as a place as big as memory and imagination. As a metaphor for where we breathe. I suspect she says there’s no going home because we are changed by every breath we take. Even with a map that takes us back to the exact place of our birth, our eyes see differently. Things are smaller or nothing like we remember. Things are familiar or strange. We get older. Friends and family are born, live, and die. The Italian restaurant where we worked in high school closes down. The boat yard on which the town relies closes. Your grandparent’s house where your father grew up becomes airport property. Your childhood home is sold to a new family. Within all that, everything changes and some things never change. The river is still the river.

I learned about grounded theory in graduate school. Phenomena, like time and space, can be understood through grounded theory. Loosely constructed, my grounded theory of time and space has something to say about the concept of home. Home is where I am seen. It is where I return but never leave. It is where I am enough even and especially for myself. It is where curiosity and joy live. It is where ritual courses through my veins and morphs and flows with generations. It is big enough to hold it all.