“Love in this world doesn’t come out of thin air. It is not something thought up. Like ourselves, it grows out of the ground. It has a body and a place.” -Wendell Berry

Blueberries, ink doodle

Listening to Old Crow Medicine Show, I’m standing in the kitchen in a summer dress and apron, hair pulled up and wrapped round with a yellow bandana scarf, barefoot in good Alabama style.

A colander full of fresh-picked blueberries from the farm, I begin to make a big double batch of blueberry muffins, ready to share with my neighbors and family…aiming for a little Southern hospitality.

I’m thinking of my “sense of place”…what that means to me, what is my place.

I may feel a pull to other places, such as the free hills of Britain, but here, standing in my kitchen in the middle of a hot, Southern summer, I am in the middle of my life.

I stir my muffin batter and dump in my blueberries, wondering what good I can do in this complicated, messy, humid, growing  city of Birmingham, Alabama.