Where are you from?

My great grandmother's hands, they're wrinkled with time. Wrinkled with the work of the Depression and the sending off of too many sons to too many wars and the holding of not enough babies and the snapping of countless green beans. Wrinkled like the knotted wood of the porch on which she sits pruning her tomato plants that are perched up on a bench that lets her old and fragile body continue to tend the earth.

She's claimed 93 for the last few birthdays. Nobody questions it. It doesn't matter much anymore.

She's lived in this house since before anybody can remember. She lives alone, a widow for nearly two decades, the family coming to visit her daily. I don't have a face to put to their names, buts she talks of them highly in the letters she sends me, written with her wrinkled hands.

She's not leaving her mountain.
She's a woman of strength, dignity, and pride.
This is her home.

And how did this woman give rise to a great granddaughter who can't sit still long enough to call a place home?

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The speaker is about to begin. I make my way through the hallway until I reach the crowd slowly peeling into the conference room.

"Where are you from?"

I don't pause for a moment. I give the name of a city in California.

I realize what I have done. I've claimed California as my home.

My stomach turns in knots. Knots like the ones that make my grandmother's knuckles. Knots like the porch on which she has sat for years. Knots like the mess of keys of old homes that sits in a drawer. Knots that confirm that I am in a new life.

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In my RA's room there was a frame. On that frame was a water color outline of the United States and the simple phrase:

Home is wherever I am with you.

So I pack my bags for another adventure - one of a new continent and an uncertain end. My heart is in the shape of a globe; a young nomad, a little girl in a big world. I never stay in one place long enough to know if I am coming or going, and so it will be, and so I have accepted..  The story continues over the next eight to nine months - a story of adventure, travel, and a reckless spirit that can only be quenched by the Spirit itself.