There is a place I take with me wherever I go, a piece of home everlasting. And when I reach my destination I hang this piece of home on my wall where I can lose myself in remembrances.

For as far back as I can remember I have lived on a barrier island in a region of Georgia recognized as the sub-tropics. Here it is always balmy and warm, rarely cold. Here trees remain green year around, and snow falls once every few years if at all.

When I was a child I would play in the empty lots filled with trees. In these lots it was easy to imagine the world beyond them into oblivion. These tree covered lots turned into jungles and rainforests, sometimes trees might be castles, but mostly there were adventures. Yet, while these are memories I hold dear, there is a memory dearer still.
This memory is not of pretend, but of reality long past. It is a place where I choose to make new memories with the people who are important to me because so many of the memories I already hold dear are there.

They begin in childhood, long hours unappreciated, sitting between my parents on the golf-cart as they explore the island. A stopping place of theirs was a long, winding wooden bridge connecting one part of the island with another over sand and marsh rarely covered in high tide. Here we parked, Mom holding me by my hand. Dad would jump off the side of the bridge onto the sand—a short distance—and our German shepherd Hugo would follow.

These were the days before Hugo had to be put down, the days before my parents divorced, and before I was cognizant of any domestic problems. This is my family as I like to remember it: our long limbed herding dog bounding joyfully across the open expanse of land and marsh grass beneath the blue sky of daytime in the winter, the orange of sunset in the fall and spring, and the cool navy of nighttime in the summer. My dad bends his tall, 6’1”, frame and grasps something lost in the sand from times long passed. Closing the distance to the bridge to reveal his prize, a genuine arrowhead he places into his four-year-old’s hand. This is my childhood.

Fast-forward to senior year of high school. By definition my childhood is coming to a close. I anxiously await a combination of acceptance and rejection letters, and in the only art class I have willingly taken since elementary school there is a new assignment: Sense of Place. It is up to us to choose four places we think are distinctive.

I have one. The winding bridge, I know, will make the perfect photograph. Its rolling curves lend themselves to a composition that will draw the eye from one corner of the photograph to the opposite.

When asked to choose a photograph to exhibit in the school art show, this is the one, just as it was my sense of place. And when the art show ends it is my photograph to take home, and to lovingly display on the chest of drawers I’ve had since I was born.

It was to this place that I led my first real boyfriend, a bridge two people otherwise frightened of bridges could stand on free of the fear of drowning in water at best only waist high, and the fear of falling from a great height. Here, for once, we could face our fears without panic, we found the one safe bridge.

It’s college, my first time of moving and being aware of it. My roommate wants to wallpaper in posters, but I only need my bridge and a few others.

I’m not the only one that prefers the bridge to all the rest, however. My new boyfriend often loses himself in that photograph. One minute he is studying, the next he’s staring off into space.

It’s summer now. I return to my island, he returns to Texas. But four months later he’s here, our families are meeting for the first time. Before that, though, there is a place I must take him. I have to share my spot, to know that after countless visits lost in that picture he will see it through his eyes instead of mine. And when he returns to school and I stay here—a transfer student because of financial difficulties—we’ll have a shared memory of that place that has meant so much to me and the people I care about.

Because it’s not just a bridge anymore. It’s my bridge. A place intertwined with my identity more than any other location. My symbol of childhood and of growing up, of my first mature visual art endeavors, and of the place I still write about and visit after sixteen years.

This is home.