Recently, I attended my high school reunion. It was a big one…with a zero. I drove across four states to get there and looked forward to meeting up with people, some who had driven only a few miles, those who had made their life not far from home. It was great to see people, to catch up with their lives, their children’s lives. It was also wonderful to remember stories of the antics of high school, things we did and things we should not have done. Words like: “You haven’t changed a bit!” were bandied about but we all knew better. Life had been kinder to some. Many resembled a parent I had known and loved as a child. We had all seen some hardship and also great joy. It showed on all our faces. And we were happy to be in one another’s presence for a short time again. 

At one point, one of my classmates expressed the depth of feeling he had for the others present, a depth of feeling that seemed to surprise him. Looking out at the gathered group, I said: “Well, this is where we started.” This group of people had been in our classes from kindergarten on…for twelve years. Our parents knew one another and their parents knew many who had traveled far back in our family trees. It was a chain that led back a few generations and then forward to us. Some of us may have traveled farther afoot than others but some part of us always comes back to where we started. The people, the place, the soil and air of where our story began. 

Thinking of this reminded me of this poem by George Ella Lyon. It made its rounds a few years ago and never fails to cause me to stop and think of what I would write if given the task of describing Where I’m From:

I am from clothespins,
from Clorox and carbon-tetrachloride.
I am from the dirt under the back porch. (Black, glistening
it tasted like beets.)
I am from the forsythia bush,
the Dutch elm
whose long gone limbs I remember
as if they were my own.

I am from fudge and eyeglasses, from Imogene and Alafair.
I’m from the know-it-alls and the pass-it-ons,
from perk up and pipe down. I’m from He restoreth my soul
with cottonball lamb
and ten verses I can say myself.

I’m from Artemus and Billie’s Branch, fried corn and strong coffee.
From the finger my grandfather lost
to the auger
the eye my father shut to keep his sight. Under my bed was a dress box
spilling old pictures.
a sift of lost faces
to drift beneath my dreams.
I am from those moments —
snapped before I budded —
leaf-fall from the family tree.

Perhaps it was the zero in the reunion year that caused me to want to attend so fiercely. But mostly I think it was the deep need in all of us to connect to that place where we started. Though some may remember it more fondly than others, it is still a reminder of the beginning of a story we are all still writing, still living out…if we are lucky, if we are blessed to do so. We can see the seeds of what was planted in that early soil. We may want to rearrange the garden plot a bit, change the nature of how things have grown, weed out some of the less than lovely parts, give sun and water to others we still have hope will flourish. But our original soil still holds us. We are each leaves fallen from trees planted with the evolving history of who we are and of where we started.

How would you write a poem entitled “Where I’m From”? Whose names are tied forever with yours whose ‘faces drift beneath your dreams’? It is something to think about. It is something to cherish.