This morning I woke up to a myriad of notifications about the horrendously destructive tornadoes that ripped through my Nashville yesterday. Though my loved ones fortunately maintained life and property, many neighbors were not so lucky. Seeing the pictures of prominent buildings and streets I could navigate with my eyes closed...suddenly unrecognizable...apocolyptic-looking, left me in a confused haze all day. Two-thousand miles away in Southern California the sun is shining and the sky is clear. Here Nashville's tragedies seem fictional, and the dichotomy between what I'm seeing on my screen and the balmy air around me is eerie.
I was here in Southern California when the fires were charring thousands of homes, properties, and wildlife spaces, and smoking out hoards of suddenly-displaced residents. Looking at the pictures of the scorched remnants of structures, my head hurt for affected Californians but my empathy didn't reach my chest or stomach. It was a logical pain. Now from two thousand miles away I view the effects of the tornado that touched my city and this time I feel my heart break and my stomach turn. We can't control which tragedies numb the air around us.
As this year's theme of composition centers around how I'd best define home, I've had some trouble with the question of "where do you consider home?". The nearest-and-dearest who collectively make up my home span here in Orange, Nashville and a host of states and even countries beyond these. My reply would usually include a long-winded summary of this situation. My definition of home had evolved to be so heady and abstract that it was nearly impossible to articulate and made for a complicated conversation rather than a straight answer.
It took the destruction of 18 years of familiarity for me to realize that my answer is simple, and won't ever change. Nashville is my home. What my head couldn't conclude my gut told me when I couldn't stomach lunch after seeing pictures of my deconstructed city. Nashville isn't my home because I was there for a long time, Nashville is my home for the gifts it gave me, the opportunities it gave me to gift back, the ways it used me as a host to enter California, and because it raised me. I didn't go to pre-school, but my mom and I attended Nashville and the festivals and talks and community-events it housed almost every day leading up to my first day of actual-school. Nashville gave me winding, expansive, shady parks to toddle, then run, then walk through after class in high school when I was loosing my mind. It gave me playgrounds around every corner and memories of my dad at the bottom of the slide. I don't know which playgrounds were uprooted yesterday. It gave me old houses and historical tours and a love for musty-smelling places where docents work. It gave me, gosh, live music everywhere and choirs and the Noah Liff Opera, who's black box opera concept is in part at fault for my music theory class in twenty-minutes. It gave me people I could never deserve and the best church in the world. It gave me a slight accent, but mainly just when I say the word "lawyer", and a preference for saying "egg", "leg", and "naked" the *right* way. It gave me "buggy" and "catty-corner" and pictures of just my shoes at the airport. It gave so many trees and colorful falls and occasionally a few thrilling centimeters of snow. It gave me Circle Players, who is also in large part at fault for that class I should be getting too, and without whom who knows, I could be rushing to a economics classroom. It gave me Nashville Children's Theatre and Nashville Ballet, where I began one of the best things that Nashville gave me, though the dancing didn't quite stick.
Home isn't something that becomes so de-facto with time. Home, like a healthy marriage, is something (somewhere or someone) we choose and renew daily. Nashville is my home because I choose it in the way I practice what it gave me. Ten years ago Nashville regrew itself, doubled its strength after being dissolved and torn by the infamous flood. With heavy hearts outweighed by neighborly love and determination, we stand ready with helping hands for a second time, to work for the city that welcomed or raised us.
