Catching up

Just returned from a 9 day hiatus to my place of deepest roots - East Tennessee.

Though I did not post to this blog during that time, I actually did think about it a lot.

You see - I am searching for this idea of 'community' here - and it is pretty much akin to the idea of 'home.' I guess every genuine community is a home of sorts.

In my search for Annapolis, I am trying to grasp what it means to call this new place home. To many of you, it has been home for years, maybe all of your lives. To others, including some of you who have written me, your experience is nearer mine - a new place to live or work - an interesting place to hang the hat. But not really home yet.

What is it that winds deeper into our souls when a place begins to really become home? It is pretty mystical. I realized that on my trip.

Going back to that fertile valley between the Smoky Mountains and the Cumberlands does strange things to me. I always think I will be prepared for it, and I never am.

I try to analyze it - but I cannot reach into it. It is just there - deeper than a feeling - stronger than an emotion. A settledness, a sense of safety and belonging - a reconnection with a part of life that is like an arm or a leg - attached securely and sublimely. It causes one to transcend time.

That is what 'home' means.

I am waiting for Annapolis to start growing on me like that. I believe it can, and will.

Other places I have lived have had a similar effect - though less intense. I recently heard an opera singer on a CD and something transported me back to Vienna, where I lived 3 years of my life. It was weird - I could once again see the contours of the opera house and smell the musky shadows of Stefansdom. The clear music brought it all back - along with faces, smells, dialects, even skidmarks on the cobblestones. The mind is a strange thing.

As we look for what it means to call Annapolis - or Crofton or Kent Island or Gambrills - home, it is good to notice the little things that mark our days with color and sound and life.

We never know what might come flooding back when we see a calendar or listen to a song or hear the clank of rigging against an aluminum mast somewhere else in the world one day.

Most likely it will be memories of Annapolis people - voices, laughter, tears, dreams, disappointments, life.

And they may well be framed by inanimate things - buildings, streets, neighborhoods - or even some quaint icon of innocent days past or of a happy time of life.

On my trip back to Tennessee, I saw where a group is trying to save an old gas station that was made in the '40's to look like an airplane. It was actually pretty goofy.

But I remember driving by that place as a kid, and how we all got excited to see 'the airplane' as we cruised into Knoxville. I thought we were the only ones. Well now this group has a Web site up and it seems dozens - even hundreds - of people are chiming in with their own versions of how this goofy gas station marked a part of their wonder years.

I thought of this blog then. How it must be for many of you who are watching Annapolis change.

A lot of energy is going into placing more modern and progressive things into quaint spaces that make up the Annapolis of many people's memories.

Some of those spaces might even be presently occupied by something that seem's 'kinda goofy' but has a deeper link to shared experience than meets the eye.

Every town has such places.

Can we preserve all of them? Of course not.

Which ones get the websites and the petitions and which ones get the bulldozers? Hard to determine.

But the very process of wrestling with that challenge is part of what makes us a community; a group of people struggling to hold onto a part of our shared life.

And it helps us feel we have a home.