There Was Once a Time

Nashville, Tennessee

It’s cold here in Nashville as I settle back into my home after being gone for two months on a long roadtrip to California for the holidays. My new pup Juniper settles in next to me as I continue progress on turning Homecoming and the essays you read here into a book. If I were to have made goals for 2024, finishing Homecoming would be at the top of the list.

Reflecting evermore on the meaning of home… here is an essay written on my first roadtrip in 2021 when I visited Nashville for the first time. Let me know your thoughts. Do you feel a sense of home and pride in your nation? Have you ever? Would you fight to defend it’s principals or has indifference or even scorn become the norm? With new technologies and economies that allow us to reach across the globe, is the desire for national pride on the downswing? And if so, what will fill the place?

Hoping you are feeling home wherever you are in this season. Wishing you a very healthy and happy 2024.

Xx Emily

When I passed from Mississippi into Tennessee I thought back to civilization. Then came Memphis. Then came rain. Then came Nashville. It’s a sweet, sleepy, cascading place with the Cumberland river snaking through the green hills that roll on and on forever. It feels safe here like falling into a nest. Cradled like a baby to rest.

Ruth had red hair when I met her. Now it’s short and platinum ten years later. Ruth has not a straight bone in her body. She smiles with her whole body. She gets angry with her whole body. She cries with her whole body. Even when she’s sour and stubborn, she’s soft inside her body. Ruth knows methods for letting loose and dreams of old lovers and feels no shame for drinking at 9 in the morning on vacation. While I look upon our past with regret for the drunkenness, she looks on it with nostalgia and perpetual romance. The days of jazz on the record player and red wine and cigarettes and warm breezes and the light of full moons through fluttering white curtains and the cream satin couch. Even during the periods when we were not talking, I’ve thought about her often. I thought about her while walking through alleys in Villefranche, France last summer under salmon pink walls and old shutters and white bedsheets hanging out windows. While in Villefranche I thought she would be proud of me, that on vacation I had a beer at 11:30 in the morning. Ruth, my friend like a sister who’s silence in my life always spoke loudly a promise that despite time and distance we’d be forever connected like how moons orbit planets or birds return in the Spring.

I’m sleeping in her guest bedroom that has purple, velvet sheets and soft, rose colored pillows. We BBQ and watch rain through windows. In the afternoon while it’s sticky and drizzling, we walk up a muddy hill towards a number of crows and turkey vultures circling above Fort Negley, where at the top of the hill are heaps of stones that used to be walls. From the top you can see downtown Nashville to the North, glimmering with silver skyscrapers reflecting dusk light and the Cumberland River to the East, snaking through the rolling hills. I imagine what the view would have been in 1864 during The Battle of Nashville when Fort Negley was high ground for Union troops during the Civil War. There were no telephones or computers so messages would have been sent by train, ship or foot. These concrete freeways would have been dirt roads and the sky speckled with stars and terrain with campfires at night. I imagine believing in something so much I would die for it. To trudge through thick mud for it and be shot at by someone who looks just like me for it. The smell of gunpowder and dead bodies and smoke.

National pride feels like a fairytale read out of an old book before bed. It reads there was once a time not long ago when politics served people. When Lincoln and the North rallied together and stood at front lines and boys and fathers were lost and widows were made and they were woven into a mythic ideal that pushed them forward through the horrors with a fire burning in their heart and a chest lifted because this was bigger than them and it needed to be defended and what would happen here would echo through time a triumphant song that human life is valuable despite skin color, age or creed. It reads there was once a time not long ago when people felt deep down that they belonged to something beautiful and their neighbors and cousins and aunts and uncles flew the same flag. It reads there was once a time not long ago when leaders fought for liberty and people and an ideal. It reads there was once a time not long ago when back across the Atlantic, last names were names of towns and dialects spoken. When you were asked where you are from and you said your last name with pride and the person asking knew what it meant. I imagine what that would feel like. But these days leaders are seen like snakes and cannot be trusted and we’ve been unwoven like a flag brought to a paper shredder. I imagine what it would feel like to be rooted to a nation or a region and not digital spaces. To not move from it but to fight for it. To stand proudly in it. To carry a flag and ask to be called by its name and to defend it and fight to uphold it.

Fort Negley is closing as dusk settles into night. The crows and turkey vultures have disappeared below the horizon line after descending upon what’s been in sight. I attempt to imagine the 9,000 bodies that are estimated to have been lost in The Battle of Nashville and I cannot.