Love Letter to Home

Photographs of home.

What is home but a feeling?

The wind rustles through the dry leaves that have accumulated on the brick that makes up the backyard. There is a stillness beneath the motion that cradles my nervous system, a silence that lingers beneath the lowing of cows on the ridge above the fenceline, the babbling of the creak, the occasional motor as a neighbor winds his way back into the nestle of the holler.

My parents recently visited me in my home here in western North Carolina, their first time visiting since Hurricane Helene. It was also the first time they visited where I have felt truly settled, rooted into my home. I move through my days with a plantedness I have never known before, a soothing of the flight that flutters in my chest.

I love sharing with visitors my love for this place. I live far away from my family, and have sometimes been asked why I chose to live and make a home in a place that is so far away. How can I describe the ecstasy of a morning spent sipping coffee enwreathed in golden mist on my back step? Or the deep calm of laying on river rocks, feeling ancient stone support my bones in the ways that my ligaments struggle to?

I first came to this house in an artist residency exchange, offering to watch my friend’s dog in return for darkroom and printing access. I made this large format photograph during that first trip after returning from an afternoon in town. I remember the glow of early fall evening, the warmth of the wind, and feeling so absolutely at home in my body, possibly for the first time in my life. I remember thinking, I wish I could live here, and then gripped the shutter release.

A few years and a series of unlikely events later, and here I am, fingers deep in rich soil, planting a garden, harvesting dandelions, building a home in a place I love fiercely, a place that has experienced, and continues to experience so much. I feel a kinship with this place, the stories my body carries finding space to unspool, the complicated nature of it all mirrored in the complexity of Appalachia.

These photos are a love letter to this place that holds me, even when my grief feels like it is overflowing, even when my joy is radiant as the sun.