Home

My friend Rob Porter said, "I had to get up early and run away, otherwise I wouldn't have been able to leave. Endless Mountains, East and West branch Susquehanna Valley, Genesee Valley. Those streams and mountains, shrouded in fog this morning with mist rising from the forests. They are my soul."

I imagine it looking something like this:

I thought that was really beautiful, but it's not my soul (home).  This is my soul:

Yeah, Eli took this picture last summer.  He told me on the way home from his summer in New Jersey, on the train between Chicago and Macomb, he felt that pull and that he was home and it was a great feeling. I don't think he'd ever been gone from the Central Illinois area long enough to appreciate that before.

I remember having that for the first time when I lived in Colorado and driving back, being overwhelmed by the cornfields and the small but rolling hills and knowing that I was home.  Yes, the mountains were beautiful and I still dream of them a lot, but the flatness, the endless fields, the silos and the pungent odor of pigs is my heart, my soul, my home.

I think Forrest Robinson said it beautifully (and I can't believe I just found this poem I have saved for many years):
                                              Western Illinois Country

This is the land of the dropping sky
where stars sparkle flat out east and west,
north and south, where you ride at night
on top of the world; and dawn sets fire
to waterbeads along roadsides, cornstalks
spider-webby and silver in the fields, running
forever. No one growing up in hills can know
the origin of thunderclouds, the slow demise
of days in blinding , pink haze or clear azure,
fielding that single star we realize is meant
for us-fresh hope rising in deluge, drought,
and snow to pierce the sky like a church spire,
watchful as a windmill waiting for wind.
This land, flat and haunted by wagonwheels,
washes into the soul like an inland sea,
its tide singing in the summer night air,
calling us forever on our passage home.

Published in Eureka Literary Magazine