I recently posted on facebook a photo of a country scene (the one below, near Wagga Wagga in NSW, Australia) which made one of my fb friends feel a twinge of homesickness for the country where she grew up – in this very area – reminding her, she said, of ‘the smell of dried grass.’
I told her that while I understand that sudden longing sparked by
reminders of one’s childhood home, for me, having grown up in Tasmania,
it’s more likely to be the smell of wet grass, or the sight of rainwater
dripping off the end of a fern. (This photo of tree ferns in a Tasmania rainforest, which I found on Unsplash is by Arwen Jayne.)
One of my old friends, the late Australian poet Joyce Lee, often wrote pieces nostalgic for the vast plains of her Wimmera childhood, the memory of which sustained her decades later. Indeed, her first published book was called Plain Dreaming. Again, for me it’s vastly different: I love to be surrounded by mountains as I was in my youth (and happily am once more, in my age).
Do you too find that your sensual memories of the place you grew up in, when sparked, arouse that kind of nostalgia, at once sharp and comforting? Or did you perhaps live somewhere you couldn’t wait to get away from, to find a more nurturing home elsewhere?
The prompt for this week: Please tell us: what, for you, conjures up Home?
Guidelines:
One post per person, maximum word count 369. You may give us poetry or prose, old or new. You can write to the prompt or not, as you choose. Link, below, to that particular post on your blog. Please read other people's posts too and if possible leave some appreciative comments. (We all thrive on encouragement.)
If you have any messages for the team, or to the group, please add them in the Comments space below. Please do check the group comments some time; often they are messages to / from particular individuals, indicating difficulty accessing someone's blog to read.
Next week, the indomitable Magaly will
invite us to find inspiration in October.
