Not long ago, I drove home the back way after running errands in town.
It had been a few months since I'd traveled those roads. I was astounded.
New construction was booming, with a subdivision being carved through the angry, unyielding red clay. The ground, apparently, like me, wanted things to stay the same. Orange barrels marked a new road that would replace a house of the Lord with a roundabout.
Sadness dribbled over my heart. I thought about what that land looked like when I was in high school, covered with pine woods and towering oaks — until a big chain grocery store arrived and those beautiful trees were hauled away to a lumber company.
Once, when Tink was away filming a television show, we were building a new deck on the back of the house. Since I had built our home, I knew good lumber when I saw it — and I knew when it needed to be sent back.
A friend who was building the deck called one day.
“I think you need to come over and look at this wood.”
Several boards were badly warped, and the rest were barely passable. I called the hometown owner of the lumber company. We'd gone to school together. He and his daddy had earned sterling reputations for selling only the kind of lumber they would use on their own homes.
“That’s just the kind of wood we’re getting these days. Most of it's coming out of Canada. I’ll try to come look at it. See if we can do better.”
He never came.
He never called.
To me, that's even sadder than the wood we had to use.
From the archives of my memory, I thought about the trees lost to that grocery store and now to another subdivision.
When I got home, I couldn't shake the sadness. A church gone. Trees destroyed. Land I had always taken for granted transformed into commercial chaos.
Somewhere deep in my memory, a song surfaced that I hadn't thought about in years.
Songwriter Joe South was born and raised on the outskirts of Atlanta. During the 1960s and 1970s, he wrote a string of hits that captured those tumultuous years. Songs like Walk a Mile in My Shoes, Games People Play — both recorded by Elvis Presley — and (I Never Promised You a) Rose Garden, which topped the charts.
Then another Joe South song came drifting back.
It was a big hit: Don't It Make You Wanna Go Home. It's about a young man who leaves home to chase his dreams, only to find disappointment. When he returns seeking the comfort of home, he discovers a six-lane highway where the creek once ran through the woods where children skinny-dipped, a movie theater standing in a meadow, and a drag strip where cows once grazed.
I, too, left home to chase dreams.
I was homesick from the moment I pulled out of the driveway. Nothing eased that longing — not prayers, not tears, not Mama's gentle words of encouragement. Three years later, I came home, and nothing has tempted me to leave again.
Joe South had his troubles, but he overcame them. We met briefly one evening when Gov. Zell Miller honored him. I was talking to someone backstage when I accidentally bumped into him. I apologized, introduced myself, and told him how much I admired his work. He smiled warmly, nodded beneath his thick brown hair, and thanked me.
That afternoon, the songs and our brief meeting came tumbling back.
I sat down in a rocking chair on the back porch and thought about all of it.
Then I played the song again and found such truth in two simple lines:
"All God's children get weary when they roam. Don't it make you wanna go home?"