I imagine it’s always emotional going back to a place where you spent a healthy portion of your childhood. Especially when you have been away for a long time, and more especially when you have a long, hard history there. That’s how I feel about our family’s (former) farm in rural South Georgia between Pelham and Cotton. And, no, I didn’t just steal that from a bad country song: the town really is called Cotton, Georgia. Guess what they grew there?

The farm was in the Pullen family from 1896 until 2012, when a number of circumstances put me in the position of having to sell it, against my father’s expressed and only dying wish.

Thanks, Dad. I won’t be living with that guilt for the rest of my life.

So anyway. We don’t get down to Pelham or the farm anymore. Both my parents grew up there, but since they are both gone and my grandparents are gone, we don’t have any family connections left in the area. And, honestly, being there is still hard for me because every pleasant memory (catfishing with my grandmother who sang to the turtles, playing house in deer stands with my cousin Elizabeth, driving tractors long before I could drive a car, picking up pecans that would find their way into a pie just hours later) is laced with loss and wistfulness and hardships both real and imagined. Those are for another day. Unless they aren’t, and that’s okay too.

Last weekend, we attended the very lovely wedding of a good friend of mine in Thomasville, a bigger town just a few miles south of Pelham. I’ll be honest, when she first told me she was getting married on a beautiful plantation in the part of the world that holds so much of my history, I flinched a little. But she’s a dear friend and her wedding was spectacular, and I never seriously considered giving it a miss. And once we decided to make the trek to that little corner of the world, I knew we’d have to take the kids (with many, endless thanks to my generous mother-in-law for watching the boys during the wedding) so we could take advantage of a rare opportunity to show them an important piece of their heritage.

So we stopped by and took some pictures and I tried to tell the happy stories I remember. Many of them are lost in my vanishing memory — even the ones I got so tired of hearing over and over as a kid. Another family lives in the house where my family spent so many decades telling stories around the smoky kitchen table over endless pots of coffee, watching the wildlife at the pond down the hill. The new owners have made a few changes, and I couldn’t help but filter those changes through my grandmother’s ghostly opinion — naturally she does not approve of most of them.

It’s strange that a place can be so utterly, deeply familiar — that farm is in my bones, for better or worse — and yet so strange and distant at once. I’m glad we went, glad for the opportunity to share a bit of history with my boys. But I can honestly say that the regret and sadness tied in with my love for that piece of land make it hard to consider going back again soon.

I am sure I’m not alone in these mixed feelings and emotional ramblings. Do you keep going home again, even when there are only ghosts to greet you? Or do you simply focus on the life in front of you and hope to make happier memories going forward? Maybe there comes a point in each person’s life when “home” can never have just one meaning, and never be entirely free of regret.

MJ Pullen

M.J. Pullen is a distracted writer and the mom of two boys in Roswell, Georgia, where she is absolutely late for something important right now. Her books include quirky romantic comedies and playful women's fiction. She blogs erratically with writing advice, random observations, and reflections on raising very loud kids and dogs. Join her Distracted Readers newsletter list for updates, free content, giveaways and more.