Finding my way home

In the past ten years, I've moved 5 times. Before that, another 8 times or so, starting with the big move from Taichung, Taiwan to Cary, North Carolina when I was nine (actually, we moved a few times while living in the city of Taipei, then to Taichung, *then* to the States). I always thought that I would one day go home, to Taiwan, even as my memory of it and my ability to speak Chinese faded. When I finally went back to visit in 2001, it was a foreign place to me, nothing like the homecoming I was expecting to experience. I found myself in a slightly uncomfortable state of having no roots; not sure of where to plant my feet. I guess that explains the constant moving.

A few years ago, I took a printmaking workshop where I learned how to "pressure print" using a Vandercook press. This was in Iowa City IA, one of my many temporary homes. Just playing around with cut papers, I made this print, among many others:

A few years have passed, and now I find myself in the position of teaching this process at  a community print shop here in Asheville, North Carolina. The other night, I pulled out this very print to show as an example, and one of the students said, "Well, that looks just like the Blue Ridge Parkway." I'd made it , of course, years before moving here, and long before the thought of moving here had even crossed my mind. Two days ago, Scott and I spent the day driving on the Parkway, stopping to visit a few small towns along the way: Cherokee, Sylva, Waynesville. Something about this place just feels right, and every now and then I get the feeling that I may have found my way home.