I’ve lived in the U.S. for about 25 years.
I’m an immigrant. I wasn’t born here in East Tennessee. And whenever I speak, the vestiges of my British accent give away that fact fairly swiftly. I don’t sound like my neighbors and I don’t have the same childhood cultural references. I didn’t grow up eating PB&J sandwiches, or hog jowls and collards, never had to stress over going to the ‘prom’, didn’t ride a yellow school bus,1 and did not know that ‘you’ and ‘all’ could (and clearly should) become one word.
But, I do feel like I belong here.
These southern Appalachian mountains ‘feel right’ to me. They’re comfortable - not sharp and grandiose, but old and wise, and scuffed by the eons. The slow twang of the accents, and the warm summer evenings seem to meld together into not just a place, but a way of being that perfectly dances to life’s real tempo.
Even the seasons and the wildlife and the plants suit me here.
The bears are beautiful and generally mellow, like they also know how to behave in the South. The yips and howls of coyotes, interrupting the tree frogs - I could listen to it all night. Big, dense, vibrant greenery (spring really is spectacular), with wildflowers and dogwoods and azaleas yielding later to the crepe myrtles and the bee balm and the goldenrod, and then the pecans and black walnuts and the fruit from ancient apple trees, and the last of the sweet and glossy back yard tomatoes. The warm fall days have enough of an evening chill for a fire pit and pretty autumn leaves, and are followed by a relatively unhurried retreat into winter. The winter here is a serious enough season, but not six months of solid frigidity. Snow, though it comes every year, is still infrequent enough to be a thrill.
I don’t think I needed to have been born here to belong to these hills and valleys and to these people. It’s in me as much as it’s in my fifth (or eighth or eleventh) generation Appalachian neighbor.
But I do have to let it be part of me, in order to belong. I can’t be chasing something else at the same time, nor can I be constantly setting it up in competitive comparison to my previous homes and places. Even though, they too, are part of me and my experience. I can still miss things about other times and settings, while letting this place be my place.
My heart feels softer here, and my bones, stronger.
I think a place becomes yours when you feel its grace and its history envelop you, and you find yourself protective of its present and a future that no longer contains you. It could be a street in Brooklyn, the rift valleys of Africa, the capes and bays of Delaware, the delta of Bangladesh, the peninsulas of Alaska, or the fields of Ukraine.
It doesn’t matter what part of this world speaks to you and it doesn’t matter if you were born there. It only matters that you feel it when your soul sits down, and you let your place claim you.
Then you are a native.
I just recently rode a yellow school bus for the first time, on the way to a University of Tennessee football game. I was oddly excited about getting to ride such an iconic bit of American childhood. But after about 10 minutes, I realized that my upbringing was not actually worse for having missed the daily experience of a rock hard bench seat in a bright yellow bus. Shocking I know.
As another Native who is 'not from around here' I totally resonate with what you've written. When I first came to Asheville NC in 2007, it felt like I'd come home... At the time, I didn't understand it. It was beyond words - just a deep sensation in my body and soul...