A Place to Call Home

Home.

The word slips from the mouth as easily as an exhalation of air. We don’t need to finagle over the word’s definition because, for each of us, home—like love—carries its own special connotations. We say or hear “home,” and depending on who we are and how we have lived, our minds might conjure up a place of great comfort or great suffering, a mountaintop mansion in Maggie Valley or a doublewide in a trailer park in Sylva. And if we extend our definition of the word beyond the doorway of our dwelling place, home is the place we live or have lived, a place where we have planted our affections and watered them with memories. An example: From the ages of 4 to 12, I lived in Boonville, North Carolina, yet for 30 years after leaving that small town, whenever someone asked where I was from, I would answer: “Boonville.” Home is where the heart is. 

In Amazing Place: What North Carolina Means to Writers, editor Marianne Gingher has gathered essays from 22 writers in which they remind us of the importance of “place” in our lives and in particular what it means to live in North Carolina.

In her introduction to Amazing Place, Gingher writes, “The essence of ‘place’ is family, friends, community, heritage, culture, weather, and landscape in all its sensory glory (or squalor), steeping in a particular containment of time.” For writers, she goes on to say, “all the things around us, physical and atmospheric, obvious or implied, combine to center, guide, and sharpen a writer’s sensibilities, leaving impressions that endure.”

It is these impressions that Gingher’s essayists bring to the pages of Amazing Place. She has divided the book into three parts—The Mountains, The Piedmont, and Down East and the Coast—and in his piece “100,” which refers to the number of counties in the Old North State, Fred Chappell addresses the differences of these three geographical entities. Chappell grew up in Canton and calls the mountains home. He taught for many years in Greensboro and has adapted to the piedmont. But of the coast he tells readers that when visiting there, “I am never entirely at ease.” With a good deal of humor, he cites the differences between the three sections, using as evidence everything from how we name our dogs to our slang. “In the piedmont, a teenage driver who makes a fast and noisy start guns it. In the east, he lays rubber. In the hills, he scratches off.”

In “Our First Steps,” Monique Truong recounts the story of her family’s exodus from South Vietnam when it became clear that North Vietnamese troops were about to invade the country. Truong, her mother, and her father eventually found themselves living in Boiling Springs, where her father gave her a book called North Carolina Parade: Stories of History and People. In that book, Truong read a description of the Lost Colony and Virginia Dare, “the first child of English parents to be born in America.” Her reflections on that story offer a lesson to those of us born here. Virginia Dare, writes Truong, “was a sacrificial innocent, and her presumably spilled blood gave birth to all that was to come, which was the state of North Carolina, and even more importantly, North Carolinians. They, which now included me, were born of hope, determination, and the promise of the New World.”

“My Mind Grinds the Graveyard” is Clyde Edgerton’s account of his many visits to his family’s graveyard near the William B. Umpstead State Park. Here the fading stone markers of his ancestors rouse memories of aunts and uncles, grandmothers and grandfathers, who once told him stories associated with the names on the stones. “To have a place,” Edgerton concludes, “is to have yourself in spite of the uncertainty and void of the universe. Thus, to have a place is to have the start of a story.”

Kudos to Amazing Place.