Down Home

Although I was born in the city I have always been from the hills and deep valleys of the Missouri Ozarks. Long before I was born I was stamped with a permanence that would forever bind me to the land of spring feed creeks and deep river valleys. I could no more change that, than I could change the color of my eyes. I have inhabited many places but have lived in only a few. I have spent most of my life outside of the Ozarks but the Ozarks have rarely been outside of me, not even for a moment.

Like many others of her time my mother moved to St. Louis after World War II to find opportunity.  I was born there but spent my childhood summers with my grandparents on a little Ozark's farm.  They watched after me, but as I grew older I was allowed more and more freedom to venture around the farm, down to the creek and beyond...a freedom lost to many today.  Now fifty years have gone by and those idyllic days are still with me.  In those moments when I look back, through the haze of time like the mists of fall I can still see the land, the people...still feel the cool grass and hear the summer breezes sighing through the trees.

They say you can't go home again. I guess that's true enough. Times change, people grow old and die. We change. But there are some places that never leave you. They stay with you no matter where you are. They call you back to them, even after many years.