About the show:
Life is a journey. A series of left turns, u-turns, and sometimes, a 180 thrown into the mix for good measure. As a dear friend once told me, “all the fun is in the gettin’ there.”
Growing up in South Carolina, I never really had a firm sense of place. As a little girl, I always felt like a bit of an outsider. You’re not southern just because you like grits and iced tea, or can name all of the local flora and fauna. My parents were in essence, imports to this culture; mom from Maine and dad from California.
Their Southern accent would come much later. All of our family had a slight twist on that classic twang that wasn’t what one might consider 100% faithful (at least not to my ears). Visit or live somewhere outside the deep south however, and that’s when it’s clear to others where you come from. Somehow through osmosis, the sing-songiness and slow dramatic pauses that all southerners possess never leaves you once it grabs hold.
I grew up on a little plot of land that was a crude version of today’s cute mini-farms that flood Instagram. We played in the murky-soggy-bottom of our pond and threw big handfuls of stink weed at each other that stuck to our backs with a definitive *splat*. We kicked around barefoot on dirt paths and rode around on a lazy Shetland pony who tolerated us with an eye roll and a painfully slow saunter.
We had to get up early to gather eggs and milk the goats that left their little pellets everywhere in the yard. We hung out in the early morning fog to watch piglets being born. We had cows, chickens, geese (man, I loathed those things) and rabbits. That inky pond was full of catfish, bass, crappie, bream and giant bullfrogs whose eyes shown out into the night like strange alien lights. We had to learn to catch and clean and eat all of it. We had to pick the hairs out of the goat milk before we poured it into our cereal bowls. We had to help out on butchering days – no matter how much we cried about it.
And for many reasons I hated it at least as much as I can recall the better times.
I thought surely I must be a city girl, because, in my mind, I sure as hell didn’t belong where I came from. Dreaming of moving to the Big Apple and becoming a fashion designer, I wanted to be anywhere big and glamorous and far, far away from the Dirty South. I wanted to wear fancy dresses and heels and hail taxi cabs. I wanted to eat Chinese food out of little cardboard containers with chopsticks. I wanted to sleep with neon lights blinking outside my window instead of the ballfield lights from church league softball games back home. I wanted to leave it so desperately, but I never did.
Until I was 48. Before that, I did the ‘expected’ things, like getting married, having kids, and along the way managing to run several businesses. I learned to paint in my free time – how I had any at all, I don’t even know.
Eventually I divorced and then remarried. With our collective kids all grown up the two of us excitedly headed west to California. LA – the big city. Bright lights. Movie Stars. And… I hated it, because it was just so NOT me. Once again, I didn’t fit in. (Hate is such a strong word. We had some fun in LA exploring the music scene and taking in films in the tiny Hollywood screener rooms. But mostly we just rode around in circles in traffic.)
Maybe we need to leave where we came from to know where we fit.
We traded insane traffic and city life for the slower paced desert-life in Joshua Tree a year later. It was beautiful and great fun for a while, with mesmerizing landscapes and sky. We made a lot of great friends, artists and non-artists alike. We made heaps of art, and gazed at infinite stars. Got poked by a lot of cacti. Got freaked out by looming wildfires. Listened at night with delight at the songs of coyotes. We had a very happy and full life there.
But I also knew I missed the South. The food. The manners. Chit-chat at the supermarket. Syrupy slang and long drawn out stories that meandered at a pace that some city-folk seem not to be able to handle. I missed Thunderstorms. Dragonflies. Real BBQ – my lawd! But mostly, I missed my grown-up kids and the newest generation of our tribe. It was made all the more obvious when Covid hit.
It was then I knew I had to go.
It took me a long time and a big ol’ u-turn across a long road to get back to the place I realized I loved from the bottom of my heart – but had to leave to discover it was where I truly belong.
Long Road Home is the culmination of that trek.
The memories of soggy ponds. Lazy afternoons and evening walks. The tall tales from good friends. The aroma of cookouts. The beckoning of a child of the South. These memories and more found their way into this series the way it usually does into all of my work: meandering and winding their way from my mind to a history of surface that feels not only comfortable but lived-in — which seems to resonate with like-minded folks.
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