Recuperating took 3 days, and counting. Reminding myself what I love about the city of Chicago, my home of 7 years, took seconds. I peered out of the airplane window to the lake and world-class city that still holds a piece of me in her memory, as much as I hold a piece of her in mine, or more accurately, a million little pieces.

The people of this fair city are what holds me close to her. A cubs game was brewing, and the Addison Blue line stop provided a glimpse of what Wrigleyville would be dripping with in less than 3 hours. I scanned for Ronny Woo-Woo and the old lady with the walker and Cubs gear pouring over her like a Sosa waterfall gone awry. I thought of food, as any good ex-Chicagoan and present day Southerner would, and made mental plans to hit my favorites; Nancy’s pizza, Paterno’s for cheezy beef, and House of Hunan for chinese and “fried sugary things”. Mostly, I was looking forward to seeing my peeps.

2 days of back-to-back, nonstop celebration of summer in general and my visit in particular, Chicago’s unbridled humidity, and a stomach aching from never-ending laughter and joy, and it was high time to return to the slowcountry. It always takes that first visit back to the place you have left to help you see where you’ve arrived, which got me thinking about the concept of home.

Home was always where my parents lived, even after I left the nest in my eighteenth year to fly West. I longed for it, especially in troubling times, as it was the place that cared for me and nurtured me. Now, I have often been at a loss about where I consider home to actually be. I have tried to call 6 states and twice as many towns and cities home since my abrupt and determined flight. Still, I feel like a wandering, homeless gypsy, with my concept of home changing as much as my hair and my body has.

Now an adult, my friends have become my family, who nurture me in adulthood much like my blood family did in my youth. My main home is now in the Lowcountry, where my best friend David and I live. With other homes in Chicago, London, the Virgin Islands, D.C., and sprinkled throughout the states of Colorado, Oregon, California, Ohio, NewYork, Florida, and Texas, I have come to see pieces of home in all of the places which house my most beloved kin.

Sun Goddess by Jody Hewgill

In high school, having been exposed to the idea of recycling and Earth Day, I had thoughts of single-handedly changing the world. Now, I face the more daunting task of changing myself, realizing it is truly the only way to change the world.

I start at home. Beaufort County is one of the fastest growing counties in the U.S., and with sunshine on our side, I am bewildered by the lack of solar technologies offered to interested consumers. With all of the area’s advertising efforts to highlight the construction industry and its purveyors, I have yet to find a builder, developer, or any such company working to integrate sustainable building techniques and philosophies here in the Lowcountry. Savannah has a few wonderful and interesting programs developing, but Savannah is not Bluffton, and the closest solar panel provider is 2 1/2 hours away. What are the factors keeping a region so rich in resources, including abundant sunshine and wealth, from developing alternative building strategies?

For starters, South Carolina is one of the few states in the nation that does not offer financial incentives or green loan programs to people or businesses wanting to explore alternative energy resources. Without either, solar is still not a cost effective means of generating electricity. So where do we begin, as a community, to effectively implement a shift in thinking about the way we are doing business as usual?

I hope to answer this question, and many more, on Friday while attending a workshop entitled Real Strategies for High Performance Buildings in Savannah. This will be the beginning of a very long but welcome path I intend to walk towards a goal of self-sufficient, earth friendly living. Setting forth an effort to live a sustainable lifestyle using viable, alternative methods and helping to bring them to this community can only increase Mother Earth’s ability to sustain us all.

As promised, Gus and his gator kind have a fascinating existence and history. From Diane Ackerman’s The Moon By Whale Light:

Crocodilians, birds, and dinosaurs had a common origin about 230 million years ago, in the Mesozoic Era. Today, there are 3 groups of crocodilians: crocodiles, alligators, and caimans/gharials. But it is easy to confuse the three main types of corcodilians… Here are some rules of thumb: Alligators have round snouts, wheras crocodiles have pointed, triangular snouts. Alligators’ nostrils have a space between them and look like an open V that doesn’t meet at the bottom (wheras crocodiles’ nostrils are closer together). Alligators have much less agressive personalities. If you can see both upper and bottom teeth, it’s probably a crocodile; but alligators have more teeth (eighty) than crocodiles do (seventy). Gharials are mild-mannered, fish-eating crocodilians with long, slender, graceful snouts and sometimes, a big knob right at the end. And caimans look like alligators but have short, blunt noses. Within the order of crocodilians, there are about twenty-nine different forms.”

In order to “sex” an alligator, one must check out the slit under its tail, called the cloaca, a cavity in which the sex organ lies. Males have penises and females clitorises. Gus could be Gracilia, but I won’t personally be researching such a thing.