The Green, Green Grass of Home

My darling wife and I just spent a week in Britain, almost all of it on the Welsh/English border. The weather was spectacularly beautiful, 70 degree highs with skies of the purest and deepest blue I have ever seen. The place is simply gorgeous. All the beauty of the United States is wilderness, but the beauty of Wales is the beauty of a well-tended garden as far as the eye can see. My family were particularly gracious and my goal of showing my darling wife the beauty and pleasure of where I'm from was achieved. It was a true vacation.

There was one thing that I discovered while I was there, that is that I no longer have a home, a place that seems particularly natural for me, a place to return to. England is lovely, I feel confident in finding my way around and dealing with people. It isn't an alien place, and I enjoy being there, but it no longer has that feeling to me of being right. But nowhere else do I have a greater feeling of being right. I think I may have reached the point that regular travelers reach, in which they are supremely competent and confident in how to deal with hotels, can feel comfortable in almost any place, but have no sense of home.

A part of this is the globalization of the world, I can have a pint of english bitter in Houston, I watch english football teams and read an english paper. Part of this is the amount of time I have spent living in different environments, and part of it is that home is now a person, where my wife is.

However, the loveliness of spending time at my parents' place in Wales,


has led me to contemplating what a home for me would look like. A smallholding in the Smokey Mountains, shabby but comfortable, a small menagerie for effect, and a folk music bar in the barn seems just about ideal at the moment. A few years to milk the wealth of Houston and then off to bucolic paradise, I hope.