Home: The Strongest Conjuration

Home is our first place, our first people. It is the filter of our memory. It is where we find love and peace, nourishment and pleasure and where we move pain and distress into the shadows.  We lift up devotion and glorify the hardships. Home is both spirit and place.  Ancestors linger.  Home is one place, any place and every place.  To be homeless is to be without friends, family and beauty. Consider the contradictions:

Home is the place that keeps calling us back –

Old homes! Old hearts! Upon my soul forever
Their peace and gladness lie like tears and laughter.    - Madison Cawein

His native home deep imagined in his soul.     - Homer ("Smyrns of Chios")

How deep and powerful is the one home place?  Here is my great grandfather’s house.  The house stands today, unoccupied, on land that has been in the family for more than 160 years.  It centers seven generations. Its weathered and rugged appearance represents the durability of home and family.  The history of my father’s family is well known and documented by both text and images. Here are the images of the seven generations – from my children to my great-great-great grandfather and grandmother.

Sarah (1980-) and John Max, III (1983-)

John Max, Jr. (1950-)

For me, the first home is Marion and Montford Cove.  It is the dwelling place of my parents and grandparents.  I played in the woods and fields of my ancestors.  My son was christened with water from the old home place.                  

John Max (1928-1997) & 4 grandchildren

Though I have called other places home, there is for me this first home.   My path extends backwards through many generations.  

But, the contradiction –

Where thou art, that is home.     -Emily Dickinson

My home is in Heaven.  I am just traveling through this world.    – Billy Graham

John Max, Jr. & Hicks (1899-1972)

George (1872-1956) & 5 of his children

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                         
 

Thomas (1838-1881)

There is a rocky peak along the spine of Grandfather’s Mountain where you stand with one foot in on the eastern side of the continental divide where the water flows to the Atlantic and one foot on the western side of the divide where the water flows to the Gulf of Mexico. It is a wide view of the homeland that includes most of the Catawba River valley to the southeast and layers of mountain ridges stretching into Virginia and Tennessee.  Home stretches to the horizon and beyond.

John Hosea (1802-1884)

 

John Hosea and Lydia Louisa were the first generation of my family to be photographed. These images were probably taken a few years before the Civil War. The family genealogy has been traced back three more generations.  John Hosea’s father was William and his grandfather was James.  His great grandfather, also James, immigrated from Northern Ireland to the American colonies in the 1750s.

Lydia Louisa (1814-1900)

 

Thomas and James Hemphill, of the Revolutionary War generation, were among the planters who brought African slaves to the foothills of the Blue Ridge, and were among the settlers who pushed Catawba and Cherokee Indians out of Carolina.  If I could trace my complete genealogical tree back to the generation of James, the Scots Irish immigrant to the colonies, I would find 256 great grandparents.  That lineage could include African and Native American blood as well as Irish, Scots, English, German, French, Italian, Dutch and Spanish.

This past summer I spent a couple of days in the Great Smoky Mountain camping, eating, drinking and swapping stories with three Cherokee Indians. As great as the struggle must have been for control of the homeland, our ancestors absorbed something from each other. Our stock grows constantly fuller.  There is common brotherhood. If we keep expanding our family tree, doubling the number of grandparents with each generation, in 38 generations we have approximately 256 billion grandparents – a number that exceeds more than all the humans who ever inhabited the earth.  We exist on a tiny branch of the one human tree.

But the massive size of the homeland clouds a more essential point.  We are obligated to home for our own well being and for all the succeeding generations.:

A house is not a home unless it contains food and fire for the mind as well as the body.          
  - Benjamin Franklin

The strength of a nation derives from the integrity of the home.     - Confucius

Home is a name, a word, it is a strong one; stronger than magician ever spoke, or spirit ever answered to, in the strongest conjuration.    - Charles Dickens