Interpreting—Home

I am, perhaps at best, an ambivalent US American. Some branches of my family have lived in the same small corner of the nation since the 1700s, and when I go back to those lands, I feel more “home” than I have or could anywhere else. The dappled slant of light into the thick green deciduous trees and hardwood forests. Red maple, poplar, dogwood—they are home to me. These rivers who flow greener, those who flow browner, these that shimmer in the summer and ice over in winter, this beloved river who flows north, and so you always say you are going “down” to a town north of you because the river is your truest compass—this is home.

The turning of the seasons, the rhododendron who grows not just as a bush but as a wooly thicket, they are home. And spring, when buttercups give way to trilliums and violets and then a summer of dandelions—I know when I am by seeing where I am, and deeper than mind, even than heart, on a cellular level, in each breath, these challenging, gorgeous lands of central West Virginia will always be my truest home.

Yet, the political scaffolding of the “United States” holds this physical, sensory home. I feel less a “US American” than I feel a “West Virginian,” but less a “West Virginian” than just a child of the mountains and hollers and all the plants and creatures who have lived here long before my ancestors did and, I hope, long after us as well.

I’ve never been drawn to identifying as an “us” that needs a “them” to stand apart from (if not against). I see most different identities as just that: different, not intrinsically better or worse. Lately, it feels like to be a “US American” requires a sense of—and judgments against—a “them.” Yet, when I read US American history, as I have been doing more over these last two years in particular, I see how history repeats, with, for example, very different actors over time using similar techniques to take and hold power.

But I see, also, the collective power of the people—and near to my heart, the people who keep and tell and share stories, like you, interpreters. What a challenge and a gift to narrate the past, to bring our present moment into language, to connect peoples and identities over time, as you, like these contributors, interpret the United States. The stories in this issue inspire me. These authors help us to pause, to build bridges toward each other, to choose connection.

In this way, I see how all of us, within and beyond the United States, are interpreting this complicated nation for those we serve and for ourselves, too. Come join us, and share your reflections with us—Legacy’s inbox is always open.