A Sense of Place

By Teresa Swartz Roberts

Blog Post 56. Copyright 2023

The governor of Maine was on the screen of my family room TV in Metro Atlanta. But as I listened to her update the press about the shooter in the two terrible attacks in Lewiston, I didn’t hear the governor’s voice. She was just Janet, a woman I knew from church. She had grown up in the house that my office and the writing center occupied. She had taken her husband to doctor appointments after his stroke. The governor was a person. And Maine was her place. For a moment, Maine was my place, too.

While I lived in Maine, I was never sure it was my place. I was a West Virginian. I was used to people not recognizing the name of my home state. It was born during the Civil War, a northern state isolated from its mother state by a topography of mountains and rivers. West Virginia was different, an outlier. So was I.

I was also fierce in my love and pride for the place of my birth. I wanted to feel something similar about Maine. I eventually did, and I am glad to have raised my only child there. But I never quite got past the fact that I nearly needed an interpreter to understand the brand of English spoken there. Or that boiled food could be considered spicy. Or that meanness was defined as a sense of humor. It’s all cultural difference, and I love diversity, another thing I missed in Maine, a very white state.

My first real job was as a teacher in northern Virginia. I did not take kindly to the pace of the beltway or the expectation that I be married to a lawyer so that I could afford to teach. I couldn’t afford to teach there. I could read it in the vanity license plates and in my rent increases. So much history to appreciate, but I had no future there.

We couldn’t wait to get back to West Virginia. We bought a home and started a family. Then, after Grandma left us to live with her daughter, and I finished graduate school at Marshall, it was time for something completely different. Maine was that for us, and it was a clean slate that we could use to write a new life. We did that, and I’ve never been sorry.

I know there was no better place for my son to spend his childhood. He grew up. My husband’s job changed and then went way. I was slipping away and didn’t know why. It was young onset Parkinson’s.

Now I am in Georgia. It has given me a medical community that has many advantages over the opportunities for diagnosis and treatment available in my previous homes. I have written before about celebrating my diagnosis. Yay, Parkinson’s!

 I built a life here. I started to feel at home. I had church and Bible study. I spent a couple of mornings a week at the local indoor pool exercising with friends. I was guided through learning to paint by an artist friend who invited me over every Friday and by a church program that offered a painting class. I took Parkinson’s Disease specific exercise classes. My husband and I made regular visits to the gym in our neighborhood.

Then the pandemic came, stripping away that life one day at a time. I did lose people I cared about to Covid. I am damaged by that fact. I am also damaged by the time that passed while my life was on pause. One of my homebound friends pointed out that, as our acquaintances go back to their lives outside their homes, our lives do not get back to normal.

You can keep reading. You know me. There’s going to be some hope just around the corner. No, I have not found a cure. No, I haven’t been able to will myself well. What I have been able to do is appreciate that I have any way of knowing what a homebound friend thinks.

The technology that kept kids in school during lockdown provides me with connection. I discovered that my church in Maine was on Facebook and started watching the services. Then I joined the congregation for a Zoom social hour after church one day. Since then, the services have dropped off social media because of copyright concerns. But I can still attend church via Zoom. And I do.

Every other Wednesday, a group of five or 10 women from the church get together on Zoom to check in and talk about their lives. Mostly, they are in Maine. And then there’s me. Still an outlier, I am nevertheless welcomed into the group.

My son moved back to the area he grew up in, so I have a connection to Maine beyond the computer screen and my TV. We talk with a computer screen between us while our granddaughter gurgles and plays in our son’s lap. He is twelve hundred miles away, but I can see and hear him interact with his baby.

I am grateful for the technology that allows me to have a life inside my home. I am grateful for my home. I am grateful for life, even a life through the lens of Parkinson’s.