The weather we are having today makes me feel "homesick" for the U.K. I say "homesick" in quotations because it isn't my place of birth, but rather the place I feel most at home. Growing up, I was always the odd kid. My family was/is very white bread America. I read a lot. After a certain point I didn't eat meat. That in and of itself was cause for scandal. I grew up rather isolated from other kids as we lived on a farm. My cousins were the main playmates for my brother and I and they didn't visit too often. They were not really compatible anyway, their main focus was ATVs and shooting things. My maternal grandparents were a bit more "worldly" but they lived on the coast. When I would go to visit them, I would hear folk and fairy tales. My grandmother would swear that pixies and fairies would visit her. I gobbled that sort of thing up. It was much more colorful and alive than the fire and brimstone that my other grandmother would offer. She meant well, but hearing about the suffering of Christ on the cross for MY sins when I wasn't even old enough to have sinned was no match for leprechauns, pots of gold, banshees, brownies and the like. We would hunt for moss, rocks, shells, seed pods and twigs and she would spin amazing stories about them. Seals would become selkies, sea birds were the souls of sailors lost at sea. When it was time to go back to school my head was full of fantastic images and no one to share them with. I spent a lot of time in the library. When I was about nine, I determined that I had been intended for a family somewhere in the U.K. and somehow had been misdirected to this unsuspecting family in rural Oregon. When I finally mentioned this theory to my mom, she said she had often wondered who I got switched with and of course how glad she was that it had happened. Clearly, my feeling of being a misfit started early.
