homeward bound or, the thing about new bern

I left New Jersey at dawn, determined to arrive by dinner.  I've spent half my life heading south in the summer but I've never made the drive on my own.  I spent nearly nine hours -- two Ithaca trips, I told myself -- alone in the car, listening to words and music, talking to God, marveling at farmland and wildflowers.

I drove miles and miles of highway, past windmills and bright crape myrtle trees.  I sang along to a playlist made for country roads taking me home and pulled into the driveway in the middle of a late afternoon rainstorm.

New Bern isn't where I grew up, but it's where I've breathed my deepest breaths.  It's difficult to explain home as just that -- not necessarily the dirt road where you first learned everything (a place that's home a million times over), but the place you've returned to year after year after year.