Richard Hugo has a quote that goes something like, "The poem is always in the hometown, but you never find it until you go somewhere else." If there is one sentence that can sum up my whole life, that would be it.
Although I was born in Pittsburgh, PA, and love to bring that up when people try to charge me with being a native Southerner, most of my life was spent south of Kentucky. My parents divorced when I was very young. I spent all year in Mississippi or Tennessee with my mom and the summers in Pittsburgh with dad. Every second of my life in the South was spent dreaming about leaving. I hated the people. I hated the accent. I hated having to explain Hanukkah to a bunch of Christian kids.
As soon as I graduated from college, I left Tennessee for Chicago and intended to never look back. In the country, I always looked at things with a city gal's perspective. When I got to Chicago, it became clear that I was looking at everything through a country gal's lens. The first 20-something years of my life were spent trying to escape the fact that I was a Southerner. I suspect the next 20-something years will be spent reconciling that, in fact, is exactly who I am.
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