Salute to a Southern Summer: On Nashville, a Surprise Guest, and Coming Home

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I read within a poet’s book a word that starred the page:

“Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage!”

Yes, that is true; and something more you’ll find, where’er you roam,

That marble floors and gilded walls can never make a home.

But every house where Love abides, and Friendship is a guest,

Is surely home, and home-sweet-home:  For there the heart can rest.–Henry van Dyke

Since moving home from The Dominican Republic in June, life has been a blur.  Two days after landing, I bought a car, braved Nashville traffic (the city has been growing by 100 people per day since I left three years ago), and began reconnecting with family and friends from Knoxville to Kentucky.  Trivia Night at ML Rose, Knoxville’s Market Square and hiking trails, movies, and malls…  Nashville’s live music of Santana, Phillip Phillips,  the Goo Goo Dolls and my guys at the Irish pub …an eclipse, a wedding, salsa… a nine- month job search finally ends.

Nine weeks after landing I’ve put 5,000 miles on my car.  Some days the journey home still feels long.  Expats warn that when we reenter the US after so long away we find everything changed.  Nashville is now a maze of high rise apartments and new restaurants and shops.  Everything, everyone seems different, including me, because life is fluid, and the only thing constant is change.

This weekend marks the official end of summer–my favorite season which is partly why I chose to live in two warm-weather countries for awhile.  But I’m also looking forward to fall–my first in a long time–to process all that’s happened.  Today… I’m simply thankful for what has been, for what is, and for what is to come.

An unexpected highlight of the summer was when an Australian friend visited me in Nashville,  allowing me to share southern hospitality.  When I left Africa over a year ago, Kate said we’d meet up somewhere in the world soon.   An empty nester like me, she arrived in Morocco a month after I did in the fall of 2014 to manage a riad. She’s still in Marrakesh in the apartment complex where I lived when she isn’t traveling the world or visiting her kids.  When she decided to come “see the South” and me, I first said to wait until I am settled in a home again so I can make her feel welcome.  But Kate, knowing what I had learned and already forgotten–that home is anywhere friendship abides and we are at peace…that we don’t put off for later blessings we are offered today–came anyway.  I’m so thrilled she did.

At our first Airbnb our host had written the poem above on a blackboard by the door. Truly home is where friends, family, love abides.  I’ve been blessed by family, friends, and strangers who  have opened their couches, cots, and rooms to me all summer as I’ve been seeking what’s next.  Likewise, what a blessing to share with my soul sister my roots. Seeing again where I am from through the eyes of someone who marvels at church steeples, Broadway, and town squares… at grits, gravy and cornfields… someone who danced for the first time in her life when two friends pulled her on the floor to merengue and now wants to take dance lessons… were moments like other summer pleasures and people who have given me wings again.

My next post, a downloadable Seven Days in Nashville: Homegirl Guide.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.

Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.