Welcome Home!
An Introduction to the Journey (Rereleased with voiceover)
This was my introductory essay to this series, published in December 2020 (technically January 2022, but Substack has a weird way of dating posts). I’m resharing it for those who subscribed recently, and I’ve recorded a voiceover for you to listen to it through your podcast app if you’d like. To do so, click the audio voiceover (“listen to post”) above. Read this if you need instructions on how to listen to episodes on your podcast app.
If you’re reading this in your inbox, you can find a shareable, web-friendly version at ashleighellskells.substack.com, where all my other essays and podcasts live. You can request to follow me on Facebook here and Instagram here, and I’m happy to hear from you at aellsworthkeller@gmail.com.
Over the past year-plus, I’ve been thinking a whole lot about the definition of “home” and what it means to me. After 16 years of living far away from the place where I grew up, in 2019 I finally returned to a region I’ll call “Not-Exactly-Home-But-Close-Enough”: the American South.
But could I survive there? What does that word mean if I don’t identify the category of “home” with one specific place? And where has home really ever been for me?
A quick summary, for those who haven’t heard me say it already: I was born in South Carolina and reared there (“Chickens are raised. Children are reared”--my mom, a million times). When I had a choice, I moved to North Carolina for college and lived in the mountains every summer. After that, I was back in South Carolina for graduate school, until I took off for Arizona, then Vermont, then Georgia, and now Washington.
Do the math:
South Carolina: 20 years,
plus North Carolina: 4 years,
plus Arizona: 5 years,
plus Vermont: 11 years,
plus Georgia: 1 year,
plus Washington: 1 year, 5 months and counting,
Equals middle age.
I now belong--as in feel-it-in-my-bones belong--to all four corners of the United States. And while I’m no expert on any particular place, I think that the reason I feel compelled to bring all of this up often is that it’s impossible to scratch out even the most basic sense of who I am without mentioning every single one of them. I am the sum of these parts.
(Note to self: That sounds pompous. I’m leaving it in anyway).
Every place I’ve lived, every experience I’ve had there, is now a sacred part of my identity. What’s sacred? The fact that I lived in Athens, Georgia just long enough to spot a decades-long idol of mine, the one and only Michael Stipe, walking around his neighborhood one fine day is exactly the proof of my point. That’s pretty damn special.
While I strongly advocate for everyone to live far away from their place of origin at some point in life, I’m not sure I would recommend the particular path I’ve chosen. It gets rather confusing; the reality of it sometimes leaves my own brain wandering and disjointed, trying to piece together snippets of time and memory. Am I daydreaming of driving down Lumpkin Street, Lake Street, or Leroux Street? Of voting in Coconino, Chittenden, or Clarke counties? Of slogging to the top of Mount Mitchell or Mount Mansfield?
Ultimately, I’m not really sure who I’m supposed to be, or where I’m missing the most, or what the daily barrage of flashbacks and deja vu mean (if I see someone I think I recognize, I must mentally dash through a long list of where I know them from. And of course, these days, the reality kicks in that I don’t know them at all). All those past lives swimming around inside of my head leave me adrift. I’ve felt unmoored for years.
And then there’s that other thing: I’ve never really felt like I knew what “home” meant for me. I know how that must sound, as a girl growing up with an enormous amount of privilege, security, and stability, so let’s unpack:
I’ve never been close to worrying about not having a home--at least, in the four-walls sense, or the two-parent-household sense. Both are fortunate strokes of luck that I took (and undoubtedly still take) for granted.
What about the rest of it, the non-physical sense of “home”? The place where you metaphorically always feel like you’re wrapped up in a cozy sweater and even if things don’t feel good all the time, they’re familiar. They’re comforting and predictable. They helped form the you of you.
But even those cozy sweaters can be itchy. Or ill-fitting. And stifling, almost to the point of suffocation.
To unravel yourself from that comfort means you may have to disassociate yourself from your own identity, or even turn your back on a lot of the people and experiences that formed you. To some, escape equals rejection. To others, redemption.
For me, it’s always been both. After an awakening in my teens, I realized that where I was from just didn’t feel like me. And it became important for me to distance myself from it, first mentally, and then physically. I took all of it personally, the distrust and the perceived backwardness coming out of the American South. As if I was solely responsible for redeeming every negative thing, large and small, for an entire part of the country.
So I went off, searching for a home I could choose, all the while not knowing what I was even looking for, but hoping I’d know it when I found it.
I am certainly not alone in this journey. So many of you have had parallel experiences of your own, dotting the landscape of America (and, in some cases, the planet) with specks of yourselves at age 18, 23, age 32, age 45, leap-frogging from one region of the country to another, creating your own chosen homes. I’m fascinated by all of your stories of movement because a) you are my friends, and I like you, b) they’re really interesting stories, and c) our paths are now the norm, not the exception--an enormous shift from the one or two generations before us, and in some ways, more like the immigrants that came before them.
And yet, we still live in a world where “home” means the place where you’re from, the place where you feel most comfortable. We’re asked to explain it and understand it in black-and-white terms. But for many of us, it’s all grayscale.
In this series, I’ll be untangling that mystery for myself, exploring times and places that were “home” in my life, how they have shaped me and how they make me comfortable, uncomfortable, or both (and what exactly do I mean by “changeling?” More on that later). My hope is that, when taken as a whole, some of the notions of home that were veiled to me will become clearer. And my greater hope is that if you have your own questions about the same things that have shaped you, your understanding will become clearer as well.
It’s going to be quite a survey--I have an idea for every month for the next four years, to start--but in no way will it be exhaustive. The topics cover the obvious, like my childhood home, and many of my schools, and the church where I grew up. Others are less obvious, like those places where I’ve touched the ocean, or the best job I’ve ever had, or a meal that will always connect me to my mom, or a certain Arizona bar, which wasn’t even my favorite bar. Some of these aren’t places at all, but part of this journey for me is upending the idea that home has to be a brick-and-mortar location, and if you don’t have that, you’re stuck wandering. (And certainly, what’s wrong with wandering)?
There will be layers. There will be overlap. Some stories will be the wider view, a decades-long survey of a particular subject. Others will dwell on a moment in time, or in a space the size of a small circle of good friends.
These stories will be presented in an intentional but not linear fashion. Have you had that feeling, in the moment, where you were able to stop and think, I’m deep in the now, and I’m already missing it? Or its reverse, where you didn’t realize how important something was to you until you’d left it behind? Home, and what it means to me, is not linear, but more a collection of memories and moments that may only be fully understood as a whole, hand-in-hand with its sister memories and moments. One month may focus on an experience I had ten years ago, and the next one may bring us back to my childhood, and still the next will have happened just last year.
While I’ll mostly be writing personal stories about what home means to me, I have so many questions about others’ notions of home, as well. I’m excited to share that as part of this series, I’ll be conducting a series of interviews with fascinating people who have resided all over the country and the globe. These occasional interviews appear as podcast episodes (available through your browser or on various podcast apps) and while the starting place for these interviews are questions about physical “homes”, we get to talk about all sorts of other things that are (or are not) “home” in their lives. I can’t wait to glean insight from their own stories, and since they’re my friends, I know you’ll love them, too!
I’ll be including reflection questions with every newsletter for you to ponder on your own (totally optional, and definitely not graded)! Some of those include (but are not limited to): Where is home for you? Is the idea of “home” lasting, or impermanent? Even after you’ve left the physical space of it, does the mental and emotional space live on?
I want you to come along with me on this journey because I hope that it may shine a light on your own journey. And, selfishly-but-not-ashamed-of-being-selfish, the extroverted part of me desperately doesn't want to feel alone. During a time when many of us haven’t been able to see friends or family for many months or longer, this is one way for me to reach out for some human interaction, even if it must remain digital. It still helps.
So, if you’re ready for ego-driven self-discovery and cheesy platitudes, a journey all over the U.S., time travel, a bulldog that looks like Wilfred Brimley, a dash of humor, a splash of humiliation, come join me...and Welcome Home!
Image: March’s Point, Skagit County, Washington. All images by the author unless otherwise stated.
Ashleigh- I just ran across your Substack page. I've communicated with you before several years ago when my church in Florence, SC was looking for a Christian Education/Youth Director. I knew of you two ways- You Dad was a lawyer (so am I, but I retired), he handled legal matters for my parents, the Rev. Dr. Curtis E. Derrick, Jr. and Rebecca W. Derrick. Also, your grandfather, the Rev. Raymond D. Ellsworth, was pastor at St. Luke Lutheran Church, here in Florence- and my Dad followed your grandfather at St. Luke. As I recall, at that time, you were on the staff at a church camp I believe in the northeast. In your recent post, you mention your family's friendship with Heyward Sims and going with the Sims family to their place at Folly Beach. My older brother is married to Heyward 's older sister. It never cease to amaze me how interconnected people in South Carolina appear to be. I have joined your page, "Home is a Changling" and look forward to reading your future posts. In addition to your beach post, I also read your post about your time at LTSS. My Dad's last call was as the Director of Development there (from 1972 until his death in 1985 while on a development trip to Florida with then Seminary President Dr. Mack Branham). He worked very hard to keep LTSS in Columbia when efforts were being planned to move it to Atlanta. Although he had ties to LRU (he went there for his first year of college before transferring to Newberry College and he was honored with a Doctor of Divinity degree by LRU), I feel sure he would have grieved with you and me over the closure of the Columbia campus- there are so many wonderful memories of the people and facilities there. My Dad's funeral was held at Christ Chapel and my other brother and my younger sister were both married there. I went to Newberry and I also had several friends who graduated from the Seminary, who I visited on numerous occasions while they were there. Needless-to-say, I am not happy about that development and question whether the LRU Board and administration,cas well as the Bishops of the S.C. and N.C. Synods have been forthright about how that decision was made.
I hope your current calling is fulfilling. Take care.
Conrad Derrick