I never understood homesickness as a kid or young adult because I loved traveling to my grandparents’, to friends’ houses and with my father on various trips to the country. I did not mind being away from home, perhaps because I moved from one geographic place to another frequently throughout my childhood. So home was never one location for me and thus the concept of missing one particular place, foreign.

Alabama holds my roots in its dark red clay and kudzu-lined backroads, in the highways between Mobile and Tuscaloosa where I traveled to see my brother in college and in its kitchens where the women in my family told stories as they shelled peas, deveined shrimp and peeled sweet potatoes.