Missing Home....

It's not often that I find myself missing home - well I guess you can still call a place home when you've been gone for almost a decade. I grew up in East Tennessee - the sticks of East Tennessee to be exact. My grandparent's lived on a farm up a in a little community in Appalachia called Stony Creek. Their address was a rural route number and I used to play around the building that had been the outhouse when my father was a child.

After I moved to Dallas, I discovered that I was a city girl. I love the outdoors - hiking, camping, spending time on the lakes and rivers; but I can only take so much and then I need the life of the city. If I never had to mow a lawn I'd be fine with that - my friend Pete says I'm destined to live in a trendy loft in New York City...we'll see about that!

October is here and it's my favorite month. Something about is has me longing for the those fall days in Tennessee. It could be the fact that it's still 87 degrees here and the leaves show no sign of any change in the near future. It could be the arrival of pumpkins at every store around me. It could be that Tennessee finally pulled out a victory against a good team and is back in the top 25 (barely, but they're there - Go Vols!). Whatever it is, there are moments that I want to go home - I want to go sit in the rocker on the porch of my grandparent's house and look out over the magnificent colors of the valley. I want to hike by the streams in the Smoky Mountains. I want to smell the crisp smell that comes with autumn and taste the fresh apples. I want to take a hayride with friends and bundle up under blankets as we sit around a bonfire. I want to be decked out all in orange and go scream in a football stadium with 107,000 fans. I want to relive a thousand memories from the years I spent there.

When I was growing up, I thought I would never leave home - or that it would always be there, but life has taken me to places that I never imagined in those years. Life has changed in ways I never thought possible. The rocking chairs are gone - the farm was sold years ago. The friends who used to ride in the hayrides or scream with me at football games have moved. Even my own parent's no longer call Tennessee their home. But even thought I sit on my coach hundreds of miles away, I know the leaves all over the valley are changing into those brilliant colors of fall....and I guess when I really miss home, the memories of that are sweet enough to take me there!