Read Jimmy Carter's Moving Reflection on the Meaning of Home
As mourners gather today to pay tribute to the late Jimmy Carter, an essay he wrote in The Bitter Southerner about the meaning of home in 2021 has resurfaced online.
“Home is a complicated idea. Is it the physical bricks and mortar in which you live, or is it a feeling? Is it the people you see each day who contribute to the feeling of belonging that comes with ‘home’? Can you feel at home anywhere?” he began the essay. He then mused on his boyhood home, which is a national historical park, and his time living on naval bases in Hawaii and Connecticut.
“My home was always Plains. When I decided, unilaterally, to move our family back to Plains after my father’s death, Rosalynn was none too happy,” he wrote. “She was content being an officer’s wife. Going ‘home’ had not been in her plans for us.”
After living in Atlanta during his time as the governor of Georgia and Washington, D.C. during his term as president, he was “involuntarily retired from the White House,” when he lost his bid for reelection.
Carter writes, “we returned to Plains to a peanut business and mounds of debt. We added an office to our home from which I could work, writing the first of many books and restoring our family business.” He would go on to author 32 books during his lifetime.
He then writes about the Carter Center, and his time traveling around to 146 countries “promoting human rights, health, and peace for all. I have been fortunate to have seen the world, and I am grateful for the many experiences I have had.”
Yet, home, for Carter, is always Plains. “The objective has been for us to be at home in Plains as much as possible. I always have felt drawn to the South,” he writes. “I visit our family land, our ponds, our town.”
He concluded, “For me, as Rosalynn and I approach our 75th wedding anniversary coming up in July, my home is wherever she is, whether in South Georgia or South Sudan. Holding her hand, reading our Bible together each night, falling asleep next to her, that is my home.”
Today, Carter will be laid to rest at their home in Plains underneath a willow tree alongside his beloved Rosalynn, who passed away last year.
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