My dad designed and built our family’s house just outside of Siler City,
a small town in central North Carolina.
I hear that it was a long process.

We lived in a cramped, cigarette smoke-stained trailer next to the driveway
for over two years while the house was being built.
My parents barely had enough money to finish the construction.
I can only imagine how frustrating that time was for them.

But my own memories of that same time are lovely.

Watching my mom nail baseboards while wearing her garden clogs.
Carrying food on a large metal tray to eat supper on the unfinished porch.

Later, after the house was finished,
I grew up exploring the ten acres of land that surround it:
the leaf-steeped river, the woods filled with beech and walnut,
my parents’ garden, the field at the top of the hill.

I grew comfortable with the outdoors.
And as an only child, I grew comfortable spending time by myself.

Not all of my early memories are as positive
as those from 90 Kirkman’s Ford Road.

I still remember the final line from an essay I wrote about Siler City at the beginning of college:
“No place with so much sky has ever seemed so small.”

The intense pull toward that expanse of sky, the mud, the fallen leaves—
the pull that makes me greet the stars before I greet my parents when visiting home—
is matched by hollow apprehension of my hometown’s deeper layers.

The majority of rural Chatham County’s population is conservative and Christian,
a belief system that was once unfamiliar to me and therefore difficult to understand.
Siler City in particular has a history of racial tension, which created situations
that I was unfamiliar with as well.

I was first faced with navigating these social dynamics when I entered public school in sixth grade.
That experience, which continued through high school, was exhausting and painful.
I remember feeling isolated and confused.
I remember feeling forced to act in a way that was uncomfortable in order to fit in with my peers.

And although I now believe that I learned more about acceptance and communication
in those seven years than I have learned anywhere else,
I would never choose to relive that time in my life.

My comfortable connection to place still exists
in distinct contrast to the unease I often feel in social settings.

When faced with the unfamiliar—
while traveling, after moving to a new city, at parties—
I situate myself within the physical context of a situation first.

Only after I learn a space can I begin to learn the people within that space.

As Lucy Lippard writes,
“I fall for (or into) places faster and less conditionally than I do for people.”