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When I was driving home this morning, I turned before I intended to—I automatically headed for my house instead of my next appointment. My husband often gets upset when I do things like this—but truly, it did not matter—I caught my error before I had to back track. I simply made another turn that joined my unintended route with the route I had intended to follow. My hybrid trail may have been shorter than the one I had mapped out in the first place. It was at least no longer.
My father often veered off the beaten path when he drove around my hometown. Ostensibly he did it to avoid traffic—or what passed as traffic back then—but I think he really preferred the other routes because they were less developed. He could see more trees and fewer houses, fewer buildings. I grew up knowing both the routes my mother took through town and the ones my father took, plus a third group: the routes my father took that my mother also liked and appropriated for herself.
As I stitched my two routes through San Jose together in my mind, it occurred to me I have never felt I know San Jose the way I knew my home town, even though, by now, I may lived in San Jose longer than I lived in North Carolina. Routes in San Jose feel like a network of acquired knowledge that I have put together like a puzzle, something I’ve had to do to pass a professional exam or get along at a job. This information is not innate. It is not a part of me. I carry it. I could leave it behind or easily forget it. San Jose will never feel quite like home to me. I will always be standing on top of the soil here, instead of growing out of it. How odd to be in the Valley of the Heart’s Delight and not take full advantage of its nutrients.
Don’t me get wrong. I celebrate the wonder here. I’ve learned more about the flora and fauna in the hills above my house than most people born in Santa Clara County ever do. I’m excited to be in Silicon Valley. I love tech, even though my iPhone is still a 7 ( I like it—it’s red!). Plus, I’m partial to rocks and fossils and lichen. You can get all three at once here, and the lichens come in bright orange. What a deal! This place is amazing.
But, still, no matter how much joy I derive from sticky monkey flower and mariposa lilies, when I drive along a road in my hometown, I’m cruising atop a midden of memories: conversations with my mother, pavement changes felt through bicycle tires, rabbits my dog scared up, Octobers filled with the saturated colors of maple leaves and blazing black gum, Marches and Aprils spatter-painted with dogwood blossoms and redwood branches, the feeling of soaked clothes because I misjudged the clouds, the familiarity of leaves I have recognized since the first age I had the capacity to notice their differences and remember them. I will always feel just a little lonely when I am in San Jose, a little bit homesick, as if I have been at camp all summer. It’s tremendously fun, but having home to go back to is what makes it so.
When I stand there in North Carolina, I stand on the dirt that raised me, the ground my father and I dug to seat so many plants at our new house, to build rock walls and brick walkways in the yard he filled with trilliums and mountain laurel. I stand on the earth we shaped to send rain water safely away from the house toward the creek my dog and I explored all year long. When my hiking boots sink into a layer of leaf litter punctuated with flaking granite and milky quartz stones, and I am shaded by a canopy of deciduous oaks, yellow poplar, hickory and pine, I feel at home in the worst way—because, when I am elsewhere, I am barred from feeling at home at all. And yet, in the very same moment, I feel at home in the best way—because I grew up having one.
