Take This Tune: Love of Place

"It will come to you, this love of the land. There’s no gettin’ away from it, if you’re Irish." Mr. Gerald, Scarlett O’Hara’s father, in Margaret Mitchell’s GONE WITH THE WIND (1936)

It’s not just an Irish thing. I suspect that, no matter what one’s nationality or ethnicity is, there is one place where our hearts put down roots—one place we call home. It isn’t necessarily the place we happen to be living at the moment. For example, the late Teddy and Doyle Wilburn, natives of Arkansas, lived out their careers and lives in Nashville, far from the Ozarks, but you can still hear that longing and love in their voices for a "forty acre patch God sowed in sprouts" back home.



Though the brambles took the cabin I was born in
And the briars reclaim the fields I used to plow
There's a yearnin' in my heart to be goin'
To that forty-acre patch God sowed in sprouts

Arkansas, are your rivers still flowin'
Is your cotton growin' white as snow
Are the squirrels still a-barkin' up on old Crowley's ridge
Has the girl I was sparkin' gone and burned another bridge
Arkansas. . .Arkansas

I have known the troubles I was born to know
I have wanted things a poor man's born to want
And in all my dreams and memories I go runnin'
Through the fields of Arkansas from which I sprung

Arkansas, are your rivers still flowin'
Is your cotton growin' white as snow
Do the young men still piddle with the thought of growin' rich
And slowly turn to old folks sittin' whittlin' on a stick
Arkansas. . .Arkansas

Where is the place where your heart is rooted, no matter how far away you’ve roamed from there? Start writing~~Fairweather