Finding Home : I've Been This Girl All Along

Abstract

Where is home if you have no definitive place to call home, such as a house you grew up in and someone in your family still lives there? My early life was spent living on Seymour Johnson and For Walton Beach Air Force bases. After my parents separated, me, my mom and siblings moved backed to Rocky Mount, NC. We lived in an apartment and later a rented house. My mother did not own a home until I was an adult. I started reflecting on "where is home" while working on my cemetery project during spring Semester 2011. Part of my project and research was done on the Dempsey family, a local family from the Sandy Cross Community in Elm City, N.C. Their homestead, though dilapidated, stands on property still owned by his family. His granddaughter still refers to the house as "granddaddy's house." In Nature writing class during winter semester, 2011, when fellow students chose their parent's homes and the places where they grew up as their nature spots, I once again began to think about where home is for me. Home is not a place for me. Instead home is all my family's stories that make up who I am: a sharecropper's granddaughter, the daughter whose parents survived a tremendous loss, and the granddaughter of a woman who danced with the Lord. Finding Home: I've Been This Girl All Along will contain a collection of creative nonfiction stories that make me feel a sense of home and give me an understanding of who I am as it relates to the world. The four stories contained in the collection are: Catching the Holy Ghost: A religious themed story about the time I spent going to church with my grandmother; A Place For the Living: A story about my mother losing her first child; Riding to Medoc Mountain: A story about my grandfather and Sunday drives; and Exploding Into Destiny: A story about chasing unrealized dreams