Finding a cure for hiraeth?

I moved to Minnesota more than forty years ago. (Yes, I am that old.) As much as I've found to love about my adopted home: the Driftless Area, the rivers, the North Shore and Boundary Waters Area, Western prairies, the writing and reading communities, the pockets of New England architecture along the St. Croix, ..., I've yet to feel comfortably at home here. I think I've come across an explanation in a book called The Old Ways, by Robert Macfarlane.  Citing Barry Cunliffe's Facing the Ocean, Macfarlane writes:

"... a shared cultural identity developed over ten millennia along this Atlantic facade, such that Galicians, Celts, Bretons and Hebrideans might be said to have had more in common with one another than with their 'inland kin'. Kenneth White proposes the recovery of 'lost wavelengths' and 'Atlantic sensations,' the suggestion that  there are ways of feeling and thinking that are inspired and conditioned by the fact of long-term living on an ocean edge...."

I see no reason why such assessments should be limited to the Eastern shores of the "big pond." So, as I've mentioned numerous times, I was born in Boston, a Western Atlantic port city, grew up there and suburbs South of it, but always within a few miles of the Atlantic. Summers I often spent as much or more time in or on salt water than inland.

in many ways, Duluth is reminiscent of Boston

Photo by J. Harrington

It's now reassuring to learn that an ocean affinity is far from mine alone and that the differences between my natal and my adopted home places isn't just social (I still don't do "Minnesota Nice" at all well) but a more deeply embedded cultural identity. Perhaps now that I've found out about my Atlantic cultural identity, I'll be more able to relax and follow a version of Stephen Stills advice from my youth, "if you can't be in the place you love, love the place you're in." The version I follow, however, will not fail to remember that Winters close to the Atlantic were milder and briefer than those  found in the North Country, even now that we've broken the climate.

Home

Carl Sandburg - 1878-1967

Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry
 in the darkness.

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