In the Blood

Is it true that where you grow up is in your blood? If so, the dark, rich soil of Kentucky and its iconic bluegrass pulse to a rhythm in mine. Archeologists can tell by examining minute traces of DNA and bone fragments where a person born centuries, even eons before, lived, breathed, ate, traveled. Astonishing, really. Therefore it literally is in your blood. Is that why whenever I go home and I travel the country roads around Lexington, my very heart feels full to bursting with the beauty of it? Although I know it can’t be literally true, I think at the time it’s the most beautiful place on earth. This is a thing separate from memory, I think. It is sensory. Deeper even. Something organic. Arising from within. Something in my bones.

So, I’ve lived many places and traveled many others. Are all of these places resting in my blood? My bones? The vivid season changes of Pennsylvania, the sweet heavy air, magnolia trees, camellia bushes, live oaks, Spanish moss of South Carolina? The rugged, wild beauty of the Pacific Ocean, the worn marble steps of Rome, the ancient fountains, the reverberation of voices in the theatre of Ephesus, the unseeing eyes of the caryatids on the Acropolis all live in me.

Whatever gives me life, whatever lives in me, whether soul or my imagining of it, sings in my blood. How lovely to think that this singing might also be leftover for someone to find buried in the organic me. There to find in all of us.

Porch of the Caryatids on the Acropolis