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19 Postcards of Home and Homesick I’m lounging in my Detroit yard listening to Chopin, eating a peach. The City of Lights was shadowed by the Carpathian Mountains— a Baltic breeze did little to soothe his ache of home. His postcards— polonaises and mazurkas— cannons hidden among roses. The peach smells like a nocturne. I hold the pit, planting a tree in my palm, imagining the soil where roots travel and tendrils reach. His music: ballads and preludes, waltzes and etudes, notes forming the music of exile, sound of a thousand footsteps marching home. I envy how roots trust darkness, taproot, heart root, burrowing through layers of silt and clay, tunneling through bedrock to anchor a home. Chopin asked that his Paris grave be scattered with Polish soil, wanted his heart returned to Warsaw. His sister carried its red bloom in a glass urn, a rose crawling up the picket fence of childhood. 20 I’ve planted my heart in my yard, anchored to the soil of home, the place I first felt the sun, my face always turning in that direction. ...

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