The Sweet Slow-Down of Going Home
There’s a specific kind of magic that happens when I cross the county line into rural Georgia. It’s not just a change in scenery—though the pine trees get taller and the air a little heavier with humidity—it’s a physical shift in time. The frenetic pace of my city life, with its endless notifications and “hustle culture” anxiety, just… drops off.
When people ask me what makes me feel nostalgic, it’s not a vintage t-shirt or a 90s R&B playlist (though, let’s be real, I love both). It’s this: the feeling of going home to a place where time slows down enough for you to actually taste it.
The House That Held Us
My grandma, who I’m named after (they call me “Little Ruth” and other variations back home), was born in 1927 and raised through times that demanded resilience. The house she made her home—right in the middle of a field—carried our family through generations. Seriously, just open land, peach trees, pecan trees, and sky. Its walls knew not just the rhythms of our daily life, but the larger, often complicated history of being Black in the rural South.
We don’t have that house anymore.
There’s a quiet ache in me for what was lost. Sometimes I wonder what more we could have done to keep hold of that place or the land around it, but those decisions and the stories behind them are layered and not always mine to tell. Still, that house—even with its bittersweet history—was filled with a love so powerful it could block out the world outside. It was a true sanctuary, a place where we belonged simply because we were family, and where the heaviness of history was lightened by laughter, food, and being together.
The Heartbeat of Home
One memory always plays in my mind: stepping into my grandma’s kitchen, greeted by the sizzle of something frying in the cast iron, laughter layered over a gospel station set just low enough for conversation. Family around the old table, in and out of the kitchen and the “sitting room,” trading stories, passing ingredients, and trying to outdo each other with tales from the past. I’d step out onto the porch, feeling slightly overstimulated but glad to be there, hear the semi-trucks barreling down the highway, and find that rare sense of belonging—the kind you can’t buy and never want to lose.
Eventually, her children—my mom, aunts, and uncles—moved to the “city” nearby. And I use “city” in quotation marks because, for us, “moving on up” meant settling somewhere everyone still knew your last name before your first.
But the heartbeat of my nostalgia is that house in the field.
Walking into that house felt like exhaling a breath I’d been holding for months. It’s the smell of my grandma’s perfume. It’s the neighbors waving, not out of politeness, but because they know exactly whose grandchild I am. There’s a safety in being known that deeply—a type of currency that doesn’t spend in the metropolis I live in now.
But beneath the warmth of the collard greens and kitchen chatter, there’s something deeper happening. It’s a feeling I’ve been trying to name, something that sits at the intersection of race, class, and the unique sociology of Black families like mine.
The Great Migration of the Heart
Sociologists talk a lot about the Great Migration—Black folks leaving the rural South for better opportunities in the North and West. But there’s a micro-migration that happened, too. It’s the story of families like mine who moved from the fields to the town, and then sent their kids off to major cities to “make something of themselves.”
We are the bridge generation. We navigate boardrooms in skyscrapers, code-switch on Zoom calls, and build brands on the internet—all while carrying the soil of rural Georgia in our shoes.
There’s a unique pressure—and privilege—that comes with being a Black woman in this position. We are often the realization of our ancestors’ wildest dreams, but that dream comes with a backpack full of expectations.
Whenever I think of my grandmother, I picture her house—creaky floorboards, the smell of vegetables and boiling meat, mismatched rugs that somehow made every room feel like it belonged to us. I remember summer nights, the whole family gathered outside, sticky with sweat or leaky sodas from the porch cooler, saying goodbye for the 80th time as the sun ducked behind the trees. That house wasn’t just four walls; it was the heart of us. Even though we don’t own it anymore, I can still close my eyes and feel the love holding me up, every single time.
My grandmother used to tell me that I would make her name one people remembered. I carry her name literally, but also spiritually. Every time I sign a contract, write a blog post, or walk into a room where I’m the only one who looks like me, I bring her with me. I bring that field she lived in. I bring the “city” my aunts moved to.
This creates what I call a multi-dimensional consciousness. W.E.B. Du Bois spoke of “double consciousness”—looking at oneself through the eyes of a racist society. But for us, the modern Black woman “making it,” it’s even more layered. It’s being the dream and the roots, the hope and the history, all at once.
We exist in the future—building careers, breaking glass ceilings, shaping culture, ‘securing the bag.’ But we are anchored in the past—grounded by the humility and resilience of the women who came before us, like Mrs. Ruth, who cleaned floors so we could own the building.
When I go home, I’m not the “Program Manager” or the “Educational Leader.” I’m just “Little Ruth,” Ruth’s grandbaby. And that stripping away of titles is the most grounding thing in the world. It reminds me that my value doesn’t come from what I produce or how much I earn. It comes from who I belong to.
The Sociology of “Making It” vs. “Belonging”
This nostalgia I feel isn’t just about missing my grandma’s cooking (though I’d give anything for it). It’s a longing for a specific kind of community structure that’s becoming harder to find.
In anthropology, they might call it kinship networks—the web of relationships built with relatives, neighbors, and chosen family, where everyone is connected and support flows back and forth, often without a word. It’s knowing you can borrow sugar from the house down the road, that someone’s always got an eye out for your kids, and that love shows up in casseroles during hard times and laughter on the porch.
Then there’s collective effervescence—just a fancy way to describe the joy and energy that bubbles up when people come together: cookouts, church gatherings, messy living room game nights. In my family, and so many Black families, this is our superpower.
The world might throw everything at us, but in those moments, we remember who holds us up.
If one person had a garden, everybody had tomatoes. If one person made it out, they reached back. That’s the love I’m longing for, and what I hope to carry forward.
Class Mobility and the Ache of Displacement
Class mobility is a tricky thing. On paper, it looks like success—degrees on the wall, a zip code with a Whole Foods. But emotionally, it can feel like displacement.
When we move up, we often move away. We trade the village for the network. We swap the neighbor who watches your kids for free for the exorbitant daycare tuition. We gain access, but we lose intimacy.
That’s why the nostalgia hits so hard. It’s mourning for a way of life that capitalism tells us we should want to escape, but our souls know we actually need. We need the slowing down. We need the unearned love. We need the reminder that we are part of a lineage, not just a LinkedIn profile.
How about you? What memories or places bring you back to yourself?
And, how do we honor this nostalgia without getting stuck in the past? I think it’s about integration. It’s about refusing to sever the tie between where we come from and where we’re going.
For me, it means bringing that rural Georgia energy into my modern life. It means building community where I am, even if it looks different. It means prioritizing rest in a world that demands labor. It means sharing these stories—our stories—so the anthropology of Black womanhood isn’t written solely by observers, but by the women living it.
Reclaiming the Dream
My grandma said I’d make her name one people remembered. And you know what? She was right. I’m doing that. But as I get older, I realize that honoring her isn’t just about professional accolades. It’s about staying connected.
It’s about remembering that, no matter how high I climb, my strength comes from the roots buried deep in that Georgia clay. It’s about the goal always simmering in the back of my mind: to go back. To buy that land, or land near it. To build a home where the only condition for staying is love.
Losing the house didn’t make us lose the family, but reclaiming that space feels like the final step in healing the wound sharecropping left on my DNA.
So, what makes me nostalgic? It’s the hope that one day, I can give my future family the same slow, heavy, beautiful time that rural Georgia gave me.
What About You?
I know I’m not the only one walking this line between two worlds. What makes you feel nostalgic? Is it a place you can’t go back to? A person who anchored you?
Let’s talk about it in the comments. Where does your soul go when it needs to rest?
Stay ground, stay vibrant,
-SS
