Home - for a bit :)

Happy Thanksgiving! 

I started out my Thanksgiving with a few texts (not mass -- which I HATE) to family and friends.  Then, I headed out to a greenway-trail in my husband's hometown and ran about 6 miles.  I wanted to pre-emptively burn some calories.  I don't like that gross-over-full feeling you get around 6:00 on Thanksgiving night.  The run definitely helped.  I'm looking forward to another run (or a walk if my husband decides to join me) tomorrow morning before doing a little bit of work and relaxing with family.  

We had some amazing food.  Besides seeing family, who we never get to see often enough, it felt great to be completely disconnected from our exhausting, busy, dirty, crowded, challenging, sophisticated and sometimes, foreign-feeling, lives in Chicago.  I have to admit that every time I return to the south, or anywhere in its proximity since, technically, Indiana is not the South, I always want to hide and stay for awhile.  The south is sort of ingrained in me in a way that is truly difficult to explain.  Some may interpret it as just wanting to be near my family and the people and places I know.  That is certainly part of it.  However, there is something truly good about where I am from.  The people are good.  The food is good.  Life is so simple.  When compared with our daily existence in Chicago, there is no contest.  The sheer number of steps it takes me to get from point A to point B on any given day would have been incredibly overwhelming to me 10 years ago.  That is not to say that everything about the south is perfect.  It is decidedly not perfect.  At times, it is overwhelmingly narrow-minded, hyper (dare I say, faux) religious, short-sighted and inefficient.  However, it is home.  Sometimes, I don't know how it happens, but you just can't divorce the innermost aspects of your persona from the parts of your home that are intricately ingrained in your DNA - if that makes sense.  

A preacher friend of mine once told me, if you're from Kentucky, you're either home or you're forever trying to make your way back there.