Steve Earle Is Right

In "Hometown Blues" on his Train a Comin' album (1997), Steve Earle sings, "'Home is where the heart is,' ain't that what they always say? / My heart lies in broken pieces scattered along the way." When I first heard these lyrics, I did not understand them the way I understand them now. Before, I thought the lines had to do with a series of disappointments, that the speaker has gone from one heartbreak to another. In the past few years, I have gained a different perspective. It occurs to me now that every place one has loved is home, and everywhere a loved one lives is home, so that over the course of our experiences, we wind up leaving pieces of our hearts in many places. They may be "scattered," because we never know just when or how a person or place or experience might affect us. After all, "scatter" does not always have a negative connotation. We think of casting seeds, and we have all heard the fairy tales of leaving a breadcrumb trail.

2011 has brought me back to this idea time and again, as I watch the older members of my family age, as my older son prepares to go away to university, as my younger children enter adolescence, as two of my nieces have married this year with yet another newly engaged, as my younger colleagues have new babies in their families, as my two hometowns, Cullman and Tuscaloosa, Alabama, have suffered devastation from tornadoes, as I wrestle with my knowledge that all kinds of change must occur and that there would never be any one moment perfect enough to fix as the permanent moment, that the hope and satisfaction of creating, serving, and loving free us from the stasis of perpetual mourning.

As the title character of Tennyson's "Ulysses" states, "I am a part of all that I have met." Ulysses asserts in this line that he has affected every circumstance in which he has been involved, and he has created a legacy across all those interactions. At the same time, however, we acknowledge as readers that all those experiences and relationships have created Ulysses in aggregate, that like all of us Ulysses is a patchwork creature whose idea of self relies on orientation to others.

Scattered yet integral, cast and rooted, broken but feeling in a broad swath from Tuscaloosa to Johnson City, my heart has to grow bigger and more resilient as I exchange pieces from place to place. I have to be grateful that it remains tender with each new break.