Belonging to West Virginia, Not Belonging in It

After a week in Hilton Head, I'm island-smitten. Its water warm and gentle, streets lined with cabbage palms and mossy live oaks. No clamorous tourist traps or growling motorcycles. Not a trace of neon or a sign over four feet tall. 

Amid the serenity, my brow furrowed at the awfully WASPy travelers, my judgements of them just as awful: Do all of her outfits match perfectly down to the purse and shoes? Do they know what it's like to take un-calculated risks? Would they be surprised to know that 1 in 5 people has less than $1,000 in savings? Would she leave the house with chipped nails like I do? Does he only talk about sports and investments when he's with his friends? Do they hang out with people who wear t-shirts of bands that aren't on mainstream radio? Would they have a dog that isn't purebred?

Despite my misgivings about the vanilla problem, the island whispered its promises in the breeze. It told me this place could be a respite. But how could I — a woman who has subsisted on a steady diet of artists, musicians, skateboarders, writers, brainiacs, hippies, and weirdos for the past 20+ years — thrive without color? The island remained silent, but I found my answer in a memory from a long-ago art 101-type college course: White is not the absence of all color but the presence of it. I choose to believe that my beloved outsiders exist in the island's interstices, giving color to life the way only they can.

Also this: Wherever you go, there you are. I am an amalgam of all of my experiences, which now accumulate across 46 years of being a somebody who can fit in anywhere but can't find anywhere that fits. Lately, wisdom has come a knocking with some thoughts about this predicament: For some of us, trying things on for size is all there is. This is not a lack of completion but a journey of experiential bliss. Wherever I am, I take with me everyone I have known and everything that fills me up. 

The mountains and streams of West Virginia don't call me like the sand and the sea. In the past decade, given the stranglehold fear and anger have on my home state, all I have left is nostalgia for childhood days when I rode blissfully bareback on a pony named Misty, cleaned linoleum floors on my hands and knees with vinegar water at my Nanni's, and rode sitting down on a hot-pink Nash skateboard in the parking lot of the Methodist church that is now a blank lot in my childhood neighborhood. Still, the weedy hills and shallow cricks of West Virginia are a part of me in ways I'm still learning to appreciate. This is a new awareness, one that taps me on the shoulder and admonishes me to practice temperance. I tend to cast aside anything that doesn't command my full attention (which constitutes a precious few things). I'm opening up to the realization that I'm allowed — by decree of my own free will — to order my life as I see fit, no guilt or forced allegiance. 

It helps to visualize my life in concentric circles, like so: A certain set of things belong in the core, where I'm most fulfilled; things that are meaningful go a circle removed; things that matter, another circle removed; and still other things belong way out on the edge where I'll know not to let them trouble me. In this way, I can relish the knowledge that my love for the warm embrace of the subtropical U.S. south need not occlude an appreciation for the rough topography of my birthplace. Each has a place in my circle of life. 

After a week on the island, I'm all the more resolute about creating the life of my dreams, where I'll write the days away — ever-satiated by thoughts on being a dreamer, a mother, a woman, a passionate lover of few precious things — from my home near the wide-open sea, from my heart shaped by Appalachian hills.