Going "down home" is NOT lost.

Sunday's Chicago Sun Times featured a story by Tamara Winfrey Harris called "Going 'down home' a lost ritual". She took the words right out of my mouth - well almost.

My parents migrated north in the early 60's. (It's funny, it took me to read this article to realize that fact - My parents are MIGRANTS.) Every summer (and spring and fall...) we would head down home, too, when I was a child. My daddy always referred to it as down home when ever he spoke of Columbia, Kentucky or Marion, North Carolina. Daddy, to this day, will say "Down home, Mama used to make..." or "Down home, we would go down to the creek and..." or "Are you ready to go down home for a bit?"

- I gotta start writing more of this down, I know.

We would make the trip often. Spring break would take us to Easter Saturdays on the farm and Easter Sundays in Marion. August would bring longer two and three week trips, side tripping and bringing the fodder back to Papa, who wanted to know where we had been and what we had seen. Each autumn, we would drive through the Smokys and travel through the splendor of color in those mountains, until we ended up at my Daddy's cousin's house in Spartanburg, for a reunion. Getting lost in the woods, being curious about Grandpa's chewing tobacco, and the smell of a wood burning stove at night, are embedded memories that I have no pictures of.

Winfrey Harris hits the nail on the head when she says, "it gets so dark in the country that the stars seem to multiply a thousandfold." There's nothing like it. Supper is not a word that is used here in Chicago, but when Grandma set the table during suppertime, you had better pull up a chair. Whether it was my maternal grandparents farm in central Kentucky or my paternal grandparents' cabin in the mountains of Western North Carolina, I learned to value the outdoors, muddy creeks, and how to stay away from chiggers (the red, itchy feeling was horrible, or so I was warned!) There were 'trips in to town' to the Ben Franklin five and dime, just like Winfery Harris describes, too! My grandma and Mom would shop, and I would hustle and fuss over which coloring book to pick out. But that is where our comparisons end.

Winfery Harris states that she has "lost [her] connection." I can't image not returning down home, nor keeping my kids from experiencing the country ham, true sweet tea, or running in the pastures. Unlike Winfrey Harris, of course, my parents weren't a part of the African American migration - but one that many or all southern teens of all backgrounds faced - either farm or find factory work in the north. My children are "second generation Northerners" and I pray that they yearn to return down home every once in a while after they no longer live under my roof. I hope they never allow it to slip away.

And in reminiscing, I found this ancient layout that I made way back 2006, when I had just barely began my love and addiction with scrapbooking; proudly I perched myself atop that glorious white picket fence that encircled field near the barn and wrapped alongside the gravel road leading up to the house...
Here in this house, going down home will not be lost any time soon.

We will be back in Kentucky by Memorial day weekend, and the kids are itching to ride that gator around the farm, and maybe find a fishing pole to dip into the creek.