At Home (Away from Home)

The home closest to my heart is a retirement community in northeast Georgia, just south of Highlands, North Carolina. It has the slightly unbelievable name of Sky Valley. Most of the houses in Sky Valley were built in the 1970s, a combination of ranch and chalet styles, with chocolate paint and red trim, or butter and periwinkle—you get the idea. Each summer, even when we were living in Asia, my family would spend weeks in Sky Valley. Activities included hiking, berry picking, cobbler making, and trying to understand the local dialect. I didn’t have any friends in Sky Valley, but I waved at the retirees taking walks, and at the pick-up trucks driving by, and they waved back.

It’s an inconvenient location for my heart to have latched onto, given that I rarely return; my grandmother, who often summered in the house, has passed away, and I am rarely in the US for our annual family Fourth of July gathering there. Still, the view from the porch, of the gentle Blue Ridge Mountains, stubbornly reappears in my mind’s eye. When our family moved to Shanghai, in 1993, I drew that view in my notebook, over and over, the way girls will obsessively write their crush’s name on a page, just to summon that shivery feeling. I wanted to summon the shivery feeling of home.

This past month in Virginia has been like spending time with Sky Valley’s identical twin. The mountains beyond my window look like the ones from my grandmother’s porch, and the woods behind the residency smell the same as the woods beyond her house: dried oak leaves, pine needles, moss, and loamy dirt. The temperature feels right, too: winter days that are suddenly warm, in the mid sixties. I’m not sure quite what to make of how homelike it feels here. On the one hand, I know it’s an illusion, the same as our summer vacations at Sky Valley were an illusion when I was a kid: Sky Valley was always a vacation house, a place you traveled to from home. But given how much home changed when I was growing up, the vacation house took on home’s steadiness, while never incorporating home’s day-to-dayness.

Today several of my fellow residents and I went for a hike, and when we came to an outcropping, with a gorgeous view of a waterfall, I nearly cried out in something like pain: it felt like I was back. But I have a hard time picturing myself setting up shop on the side of a mountain. I have to remind my senses that this region was never my from, even as they insist to my heart that it’s where I belong.