Where Your Heart Is

I was born in a hospital in Wheaton, Maryland, just outside the city of Silver Spring. I spent nearly a year in that fair city before moving to Greensburg, Pennsylvania. About three and a half years later, we moved back to Maryland to a neighborhood just outside of Annapolis, where we stayed for almost four years. Then it was off to Folsom, California, for a few years and back to Pennsylvania.

Why does the history of my moves matter in my mind? Because I have always considered myself a "Marylander"....even though I spent less than five years of my entire life there.

When we cross through it on our way to and from Nags Head, N.C., each year I feel a sense of kinship and warmth that fills my soul. Odd really, for someone who spent a fraction of her life in such a place. But I will be a Baltimore Orioles fan until I die. And I will always smile in camaraderie when I hear of someone else who was born there.

It's funny because I felt the same way about England...and I spent an even smaller portion of my life there.

When we went to visit Scotland, I felt myself sighing with relief when we crossed the border back into England on the train. It wasn't that I didn't like Scotland -- it was a gorgeous place filled with quite a lot of my heritage. But I guess I'd adopted England in my heart as my "home" at the time. I felt myself becoming like a sponge, trying to soak up as much of the history and customs of the country as I could.

And pending the fact that some of my ancestry hailed from England, there's a certain kindred-spiritedness in all the famous writers England has "birthed" merely because of the aura of the place.

I discovered the poem below in my AP English class in 11th grade. My teacher was a huge fan of England. She had the first sentence on a bulletin board at the back of her classroom. I liked the poem very much the first time I read it, but it became much more poignant after my teacher passed away from cancer mid-year. We didn't even know she was sick...though she knew she was dying. It had been her dream to visit that fair country someday.

I took my first trip to England with Teen Missions the summer after she died. I thought of her a lot while I was there. I thought of her even more when I moved there a year and a half later.

This poem became my mantra while I was there. I guess, like the saying goes, "home" isn't necessarily where you live or were born...it's where your heart is.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

~Rupert Brooke, 1914