Wanting Home

I grew up in the very southest part of South Texas. It’s not a place that sits softly in the heart the way my beloved Oklahoma can. It’s hard and inhospitable. The land is flat without a hill between you and the horizon. I’ve often heard it called ugly or forbidding and I can’t say that I disagree. The plants that grow there are covered in thorns. The trees that manage to grow are stunted and gnarled by the heat and the dryness in the air.

And I love it.

It calls to a deep part of me. I can feel the longing to return to it down deep in my bones. Everything about it is a challenge and I long to rise up to meet it.

Miles of flat and unwelcoming

And then suddenly you round a bend and there is the ocean crashing into view.

The taste of the salt air on my lips. The crying caws of the gulls. The burn of sand beneath bare feet, before suddenly the cooling caress of the ocean. The sand sinks away beneath my feet and I dig in my toes. Hoping to hang onto it just a moment longer.

It is the antithesis of everything that came before. Here is a slower pace and an ease. Just standing Oceanside and I smile until my cheeks ache. I can’t stop grinning. The smell. The sounds. The feel of it.

I miss it all the desert and the ocean. I miss the contrast between the two, the ability to slip from to the other and back again.

It is home in ways nowhere else can be. It excites me with its challenges and calms me with its soul.

I’m counting the days until I can go back again.

Soon. Incredibly soon.