Coming Home From Home

Posted bySheila Morris 2 Comments on Coming Home From Home

It’s surprisingly easy to drive a thousand miles from Montgomery, Texas to Columbia, South Carolina.  Two days on the road with a nine-hour break in a comfy motel bed.   The roads are good but we share them with many travelers who join us in driving from here to there to wherever.   Truck drivers pulling heavy loads remind me of the burdens I’ve carried for many years so I like to see the eighteen-wheelers as they struggle to make a hill but cruise on down the road once they reach the crest.   I feel I’ve reached the top of an incredibly high hill in my life at this moment and can finally begin to coast on the other side.   The responsibilities and pressures I’ve owned for so long are pieces falling from my truck bed into ditches along the way.   They fly out and float and vanish as they hit the ground.

Published by Sheila Morris

Sheila Morris is a personal historian, essayist with humorist tendencies, lesbian activist, truth seeker and speaker in the tradition of other female Texas storytellers including her paternal grandmother. In December, 2017, the University of South Carolina Press published her collection of first-person accounts of a few of the people primarily responsible for the development of LGBTQ+ organizations in South Carolina. Southern Perspectives on the Queer Movement: Committed to Home will resonate with everyone interested in LGBTQ+ history in the South during the tumultuous times from the AIDS pandemic to marriage equality. She has published five nonfiction books including two memoirs, an essay compilation and two collections of her favorite blogs from I'll Call It Like I See It. Her first book, Deep in the Heart: A Memoir of Love and Longing received a Golden Crown Literary Society Award. Her writings have been included in various anthologies including Out Loud: the best of Rainbow Radio, Saints and Sinners New Fiction from the 2017 Festival, Mothers and Other Creatures; Cowboys, Cops, Killers, and Ghosts (Texas Folklore Society LXIX). She is a displaced Texan living in South Carolina with her wife Teresa Williams and their dogs Spike, Charly and Carl. She is also Naynay to her two granddaughters Ella and Molly James who light up her life for real. Born in rural Grimes County, Texas in 1946 her Texas roots still run wide and deep.

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