Of My Three Hearts
While my physical heart is tasked with rearranging oxygen in my cells, I have another heart that lives in wild and rocky places. Great sweeping landscapes of highlands and dales, swathed in a velvet green robe decorated with sheep and sacred neolithic arrangements. It is the kind of place I know in my bones, in the bones of my ancestors that are buried throughout the Appalachians and the moorlands of northern England. When I was a child, my family paid a visit to the counties in the narrow part of the United Kingdom. We rode horses. We wandered and ostensibly, got lost. But I knew what I had found, even if I did not know its name.
Then, when I was a young girl and we were briefly making a home in a conservative low country, I was without many friends, struggling to understand where I belonged and overwhelmed with homesickness for a place I’d only seen once. I wept in the car on the way to school, feeling caged in by closed-minded folks who seemed to have never imagined that there was a world beyond the county line. I wept in the school counselor’s office, waiting for my mother to come and pick me back up a few hours later, unable to say anything more than “I don’t belong here.”