Oh Shenandoah

"Oh Shenandoah,

I long to see you,

Away you rolling river.

Oh Shenandoah,

I long to see you,

Away, I'm bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri.

'Tis seven long years

since last I saw you,

Away, you rolling river.

'Tis seven long years

since last I saw you,

Away, we're bound away

'Cross the wide Missouri."

These are the words of a well-known American folk-tune, one of my absolute favorites. I became familiar with it as we practiced and performed it in my choir class in high school. "Mama J," our instructor, was a brilliant, fierce woman. When we lacked feeling while singing, she stopped us short and asked us to envision the anonymous author's yearning--seven long years since seeing his beautiful homeland of Shenandoah. 

At that point in my life I had never been away from home for any amount of time longer than a week (which was usually spent in Disneyland, where I was too busy having too much fun with my family to have any amount of longing for anywhere else).

This past Sunday afternoon I found myself in Virginia, driving through the lush landscape of the Shenandoah Valley for the first time. As I crossed the river, the words of this gorgeous song and my experience learning it came flooding back into my mind. I thought of my longing for home when I lived abroad in South America, and how really small things--like a rare package of Skittles or the smell of a perfume that mimicked my mother's--sent me crash-landing into a wave of homesickness. I thought of how, at times, I have stifling moments of missing Argentina, with it's impassioned people and its queso cremoso and its cattle and its steaming copas de mate. I felt--at that present moment--my ferocious longing to hold my husband and my infant son, who I had left for just four days for this trip through history. 

Those two, they are my Shenandoah.

What's yours? What (or whom) do you love and long for?