Ecology of Home

Turning back to embrace the past has been a long, slow lesson not only in self-esteem but in patriotism--pride in homeland, heritage. It has taken a decade to whip the shame, to mispronounce words and shun grammar when mispronunciation and misspeaking are part of my dialect, to own the bad blood. What I come from has made me who I am.
--from Ecology of a Cracker Childhood by Janisse Ray

What I come from has made me who I am.

What I come from is a home with yellow shag, a dishwasher never used for washing but fake baking of Play-Do, windows stiff to open, popcorn ceilings and overhead lights that dim. I come from the hands of a printer, the belly of a woman who only longed to be a mother, the skin of Germans and English and not farmers. From a land with brown water, more sky than you need, trees that try for height, and wind everlasting.

There is sand beneath me. Sand driven from faraway oceans by that everlasting wind and cast down, orphan to the sea, on rolling prairie. Sand hills provide elevation, if only slight, so that the paths you took to reach them wind away and lose themselves in the horizon, just like every word you ever say. Just like old friends, plastic bags, memories of your youth.

In that plant I was looking for a manera de ser, a way of being--no, not for a way of being but of being able to be. I was looking for a patch of ground that supported the survival of rare, precious, and endangered biota within my own heart.
--Ray

Because there is sand beneath me, and because what I come from has made me who I am, I study the trees for their strength. How do they grow in the full blow of the sun? How do they not rise higher than trees anywhere else in the world with that full blow of the sun? How did they get here? When will they go? Can I claim one for my own, a sister tree, and follow it on its slow extension, sleep when it sleeps in the winter, sing when May turns us green?