Where I belong

Driving the backroads through Scio, Sublimity and Silverton, Willamette Valley farmland, green, alive, so quietly beautiful that I have to stop the car by the side of the narrow road to catch my breath (and, okay, dab my eyes). Pastures, orchards, vineyards, little tree farms, sheep, rolling hills. For the thousandth, millionth time since I moved here four decades ago, I think: This is my home. This is my home. I am a Willamette Valley girl.

I remember when I first set foot Oregon. I stayed in a tiny, hand-made cabin at a long-established commune out Fall Creek where the folks made dulcimers and gardened in the nude. They had goats and made goats’ milk yogurt and ice cream. There was an 18-month-old who ran around diaperless and peed everywhere. There was a startlingly beautiful 20-something man who whacked at weeds wearing a flowing dress he had designed and sewn himself.

After a few days, I made my way into Eugene where I strolled down 13^th Avenue. I was walking past the House of Records when I was suddenly overcome with this feeling. It overtook mind and body. Oh, and spirit too. Not to be overly dramatic. But it was overly dramatic. That was the precise moment I felt…at home. That was the moment I said to myself: Ah ha, this is how people feel when they feel at home. I had never felt that before. I had lived various places in New York, Illinois, and California, some of which I had hated, some of which I had liked, none of which I had loved.

Later that afternoon I sat with a cup of herbal tea at Mama’s Homefried Truckstop where a guy with a guitar was singing John Denver’s Country Roads. I didn’t like John Denver. And Country Roads was about West Virginia. But when that guy sang, “take me home to the place where I belong,” I was a goner. To belong. I didn’t know I was (cliché alert) waiting to exhale. But I was. Although I have traveled a lot through the years, although it was necessary to live other places before I was able to return to Eugene, I have never wanted to live anywhere else.

I think, with all due respect to my husband of three decades and the (very few) other men to whom I have said “I love you” –and excluding my children because my love for them comes from an entirely different, unfathomly deep place—it may be that the love affair of my life is with the Willamette Valley, with my home.