The first two months we were back in Georgia my primary occupation was to not be depressed.

Don’t get me wrong. We chose to return to the land where I was born. But hardly a day goes by that I don’t compare where I was six months ago with where I am now.

Two scales hang from an imaginary balance-yard. On one side rests the foothills of Vermont, Connecticut River Valley, the place we lived the last four years, and on the other hangs my homeland, the coastal plain flatwoods of rural Georgia.

I pile on the weights and counterweights.

What I use to judge each place are its features and conveniences, and in this mind-game I’ve learned that someone else’s amenity is not necessarily mine. For example, real estate agents lately have taken to including in their sales pitches the proximity of Wal-Mart.

“It’s only seven miles away, and a superstore eleven miles away,” I heard one say. But a large shopping facility is not an effective selling point for me, because it’s not an amenity.

What is most important to me in a home is this: the infrastructure that helps me lead a life that is sustainable. I want my life to make sense and do as little damage as possible.

To that end, there is no doubt which place tips the balance in my mind.

Our town in Vermont, Brattleboro (population 12,000), had everything our family wanted. It had organic agriculture, nearby woods, good neighbors, active learning, bikeable streets. When friends visited from out-of-town, we had a long and fun itinerary for them—farmers market, food cooperative, our plot in the community garden. There was a view of the river from Mount Wantastiquet to see, downtown to stroll through, and the bookstore’s superb collection of bumper stickers to peruse. A local diner served ginger ice-cream through its summer window and a woman horse-logger gave buggy rides through the autumn apple orchard.

In our small crossroads town in Georgia, called Baxley (population 3,500), there’s no farmers market, no food co-op, no yoga classes, no farm stands, no organic dairies, no corn mazes. No daily paper, no television station, no bookstore, no you-pick apple orchards. In fact, no apple orchards at all. No community garden. No university, no poetry readings, no art galleries.

At first glance the infrastructure that we are looking for does not exist here.

And yet, a homeland, if a person is lucky enough to have one, whether inherited or chosen, has a place in a heart that cannot be denied. It has a history that cannot be ignored, and the longer the history—in my case almost 200 familial years—the greater the magnetic force until a prodigal son or daughter, like a homing pigeon, must return.

~*~

We in America have become, for the most part, a place-less people. We live in places, and travel between them, and usually we know the names of the places we travel between, but they have little further significance. Our ties to them are often financial or sometimes by default—we are kept in a place simply because we find ourselves there.

We have few gut connections to the landscape. By “gut,” I mean that place where the psychic, the spiritual, the rational, and the physical mingle. Most of us do not know the texture and fertility of our soils, and frosts harden and melt upon non-native grasses without our knowing. We are ignorant of what portends with a certain arrangement of clouds, and even the common names of the birds escape us.

In part, the sense of place that most of our ancestors possessed has become for us an inventory of conveniences, so that we are capable of saying: I don’t know the date great-crested flycatchers return, but I know where to buy a good hamburger. I don’t know the phase of the moon, but I know where there’s wireless.

~*~

My family went to Vermont in an effort to make our lives more whole. We went so that our son, who has two sets of parents, could be near them all. Brattleboro, fondly described as the “most liberal town in the most liberal county in the most liberal state east of the Mississippi,” offered a kind of wholeness. It offered community. It offered disaster-readiness. It offered thought.

Thought is important. I believe that education is vital to meeting and solving a challenge with elegance and speed. The more educated people are, the more they are involved in community, the more ideas they have, and the more gets created and accomplished. (Nor must a person only be educated through university; a good education can also be obtained by travel, apprenticeship, books, lectures, etc.) Of Brattleboro’s population, 86.3 percent finished high school and almost 40 percent obtained a college degree. In Baxley, on the other hand, only 65 percent of the citizenry finished high school. Eight percent have a higher degree.

Oh, Georgia has amenities. Winter is mild, spring other-worldly, aflood with bloom. The growing season is long. Family members live nearby. The historic courthouse is renovated. We hike with visitors to gaze at 1,000-year-old cypress and old-growth longleaf pine at the now-protected Moody Forest. A tour of my father’s junkyard is in order. In fall Mr. Hutto’s nuthouse, stacked with burlap sacks full of pecans, is a sight to see.

But what draws me back South is a deep and powerful knowledge that this is my place, like none other can ever be. My bones are made of it.

I think a sense of place, for a native, begins before birth, and is strengthened with stories through childhood, and also experiences and then the memories of events. A sense of place begins by listening, and grows.

For an adopted resident, this sense probably starts with stories, then appreciation of the superficial, scenery, which in turn leads a person to closer inspection of the landscape, and directly into natural history.

Things happen to us in places we love. Thus our psyches, which are made of our memories, become inextricably tied to place. What transpires, if we are living close to the land and listening to it, is an investment in place because our well-being and survival depend on it.

Sometimes I wish I had been born elsewhere. Every time I visit Unity, Maine, for example, I want to sit forever on a downtown front porch, watching the passage of summer. The wild mountain meadows of Montana call my name very loudly. And not long ago I found myself in Amish country to give a lecture. Around 4:30 one morning, during a sleepless hour, I heard the clomping of hooves on the road in front of the inn, the most beautiful sound I’d heard in a long time. Three hours later the wagon passed again, in the opposite direction, and this time I saw it, a small Amish carriage pulled along by a dark-brown horse moving fast.

But southern Georgia is my nativity.

Vermont has a culture of stone fences, strawberry suppers, sugar-on-snow, and ice-fishing. But, beneath its losses, its depleted landscape and youth-bereft communities, Georgia has a culture too: watermelons, pilaus, blues music, sorghum syrup. I am clear that gentrification is not the answer for making a place liveable. People come to a place for its culture, says the old saw, and before long they have destroyed that culture. Canonizing a culture, too, destroys it. The only way to keep it is to live it.

How do we improve our communities without destroying their cultures? How do we make them more sustainable, which is more liveable and affordable? How do we listen?

We are going to have to fall in love with our places again. We are going to have to walk them and study them. We are going to have to commit ourselves to them.

Janisse Ray grew up in a junkyard along U.S. Highway 1. She is the author of Pinhook, Wild Card Quilt, and Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, which won the American Book Award, as well as the Southern Book Critics Circle Award, Southeastern Booksellers Association Award for Nonfiction, and the Southern Environmental Law Center Award. A naturalist, environmental activist and winner of the 1996 Merriam Frontier Award, she has also published her work in Wild Earth, Orion, Florida Naturalist, and Georgia Wildlife and has been a nature commentator for Georgia Public Radio. She recently returned to Georgia after living in Vermont.