Sunday, April 15, 2012

Now That I'm Not Trying to Write About Home

I‘m sitting at my dining room table, which has somehow morphed into an office (we eat here only on special occasions), spending more time looking out the big glass doors to the deck than I am writing. The skies are overcast, and the wind is spinning the CDs our neighbor strung up to keep deer out of his garden. I’ve given up writing a blog on “home” because another Sunday has brought another subject, and I still can’t decide what “home” means to me.

I actually started thinking about this shortly after my husband and I retired and he brought up the possibility of moving “home,” meaning the area where we were reared. (We grew up not 10 miles from one another.) I told him I’d miss him.

The house where he grew up no longer stands, yet he feels some kind of deep connection to the land. I do not. Many times I’ve driven past the house where I spent most of my childhood (photo left) and asked myself what I’d do if it was put on the market now that I’m no longer required to leave my house to work. I don’t think I’d feel the need to act.

I can’t help but wonder if the vagabond nature of my very early life caused me to grow such shallow roots. I spent more time on trains than on terra firma the first couple of years, then lived in rented houses until after I started kindergarten. My husband was brought home after he was born to the same house where he and I were married twenty years later.

What does he feel that I lack? I think the concept of “home” must be of a magical place where you feel you belong and are at peace. The house I live in now (photo left) is the fourteenth place my husband and I have lived since we married. It’s a humble but comfortable house with a good vibe, and I like to come back to it after I’ve been away. But it lacks that magic, that peace. I’ve felt that only one place in my life—at the old resort in the Missouri Ozarks where my family sometimes spent long weekends.

And that, my friends, is a blog for another day.

8 comments:

  1. What an honest and straight story from your heart. Home isn't where you are. I wish you and your husband could just go to your Ozark place fro a while, see if it still feels like home.

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    1. A few years ago, we did go, and as we went over the bridge across the Gasconade River and turned the corner onto the dirt road, it was like going through a veil into another dimension. That place is absolutely magical--but only to me. He didn't feel it. Still, if I ever win the lottery, I'll see if I can't buy at least a big chunk of it, and maybe a nice little farm in Southern Illinois for my husband.

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  2. Did you realize your story starts off as a poem in the first paragraph! Home is where the heart is...We've moved quite a bit in our married life. As long as there is love, it is home.

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    1. Didn't think of it that way at all. But that certainly is true. I've also discovered that I'm much more dependent on artwork and furnishings to create "home" than on any particular location. Not sure where that came from, except that my mother had a few belongings, a set of bookends and a little side table, that she carried with her from the early days of her marriage. I still have the bookends; my sister still has the table.

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  3. We've moved a few times and at each new start, I felt like a visitor in a foreign place. Every time we moved though, I shed tears as I closed the door for what I knew would be the last time. We'll be moving again at least one more time and though I'm excited about the idea, I know that as I lock the door and walk away, I'll mourn a little for the place that holds a handful our chapters.

    Home is wherever you are, wherever love lives. And though a box or two always seems to get lost with every move, the really important stuff goes with us.

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  4. My thoughts are that the places where we felt, or feel most alive, and engaged with our worlds are the ones that have that magick you speak of. There are many for me, but one that I remember (as a result of your post) is the cabin in Montana where we spent just a few summer nights in. There was a tire swing, a campfire, and great family memories of stories around it. There was no bathroom inside the cabin, it was half way up a hill, and a porcupine that lived under the floorboards (or several over the years) that would peek it's little nose up on occasion while we were inside. It's a place that I later went to write when I was by myself for a moment or three, and the energy of my innocence remained. To me that was magickal, because there weren't many places that I did play.

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    1. When we first started going there, these cabins didn't have bathrooms, either, just outhouses, each shared by two cabins. Glad I was able to bring a happy memory to you. We really need to cling to those happy ones.

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