The Rain

It's gray today in Texas, like yesterday and before, 

and I wonder how it is back home, wherever that may be.

I was born and raised a Buckeye, with a Hoosier for a Dad,

my mother born a Yankee, but Midwest truly bred.

And here I am in the Lone Star State, thinking of all the places before: 

Ohio, New York, Missouri, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, New Jersey, Kansas...

How many more will I call "home" and how many more will truly feel that name?

It's gray today in Texas, and I'd rather be Upstate. To feel crisp air around me, drive past orchards going home, smell the clean air as I approach the seaway and revel in the wooded hills of New York.

It's fall, but doesn't seem like it, and I long for the Northeast. To stop at a road-side farmers stand after getting off the turnpike and head back home with Springsteen playing on the radio and Jersey farms all around me.

I've been so many places, these so many long gone years,
but I know home when I feel it, and it just isn't here...

© Erica Day McCarthy, San Antonio, TX - 9 October 2018