You'd think that the place I lived for thirty years would feel a lot more like "home" than our relatively new digs in the city, but... In Vermont I walk through the rooms as if they're a labyrinth engraved on my memory. I get up in the night and navigate without seeing; my bare feet know and avoid the creaky floorboards that might wake my husband; I find the light switch automatically. In fact, I think I could still do that in the house I grew up in, even though I haven't lived there forever. I used to think home meant familiar, but I no longer think that's a definite part of the definition.
In the most practical, everyday sense, home does have something to do with externals. Home is where I feel comfortable: comfortable in my own skin, relaxed with the people and place and culture around me and subtly supported by them. In the most philosophical sense, though, I've come to see home as a tortoise does: it is something I carry with me.
We've made this house a warm home for ourselves and the people who visit here; there's hardly a square inch inside or out that we haven't touched or altered somehow, and yet as we strip the layers of our life here away, we see that created ambience breaking apart. When we leave this place, we realize we'll take its unique essence with us; that was something that came from us, not from the wood and plaster structure or the even the particular slant of light moving through the rooms. The physical form will then become, for us, a memory to be revisited in dreams and imagination, but the remaining structure will be someone else's home, to shape as they want or can.
Right now I'm not nostalgic for the past, nostalgia being an emotion I don't much care for. I do miss Montreal though: lunches of green tea and cherries, beets and goat cheese on our terrace, the sound of bike locks clinking against bike frames, the squeak of swings in the park, voices in the alley late at night, sparrows in the trees. Someone called this morning and I was so happy to hear the sound of French I felt my heart leap toward him through the phone.
I carry all of this with me, too. Home actually does seem to be where my heart resides -- and it lives still in all the places I've ever lived, with all those I've loved -- but most of all it needs to be where I am right now, like a tent in the desert carpeted with rugs and warmed by a small fire made from all those experiences, all those loves, so that I can always meet and welcome the friend and the stranger, and remember who I really am.
A wonderful post on the shifting “space” of home, Beth. I am going through something similar in an odd way, as I dismantle the childhood rooms of my sons. Physically I am living in the same house as the one that was their childhood home, but now that the rooms have already been stripped of the “things” from that past (which was the reason we moved into this house int he first place), I find myself a bit “homesick” in this suddenly alien space that is supposed to be claimed by me now. So I know what you mean about home being where the heart is, oh boy, do I know it.
Posted by: maria | June 22, 2009 at 07:25 PM
Your post is just the thing I want as I consider a future, one no doubt envisioned strangely, where I might be, might "end up." What birds, trees, bathrooms, cats, dogs accompany me? Those that the me that is inhabits -- there -- at that time.
Thank you! (And a lovely lunch, I might add!)
Posted by: Deb | June 22, 2009 at 09:38 PM
Lovely picture, lovely writing. There is nothing so wonderful as lunch at home.
Posted by: Nora | June 23, 2009 at 08:54 AM
For another perspective on home:
My Home, My Shadow Home: Where We Really Live
http://sharonastyk.com/
Posted by: EJ | June 23, 2009 at 12:03 PM
These are wise words, Beth. As places change, people change and hearts change. I know I am the same person I was 50 years ago, and yet I know I'm not. I look at pictures of my adorable babies and realize that those babies are gone. They are in their 50's now, and they have had more than half a life-time to make them what they are from what they were in the beginning. As we take home with us through life, home changes as we change. With that change there is loss, and gain.
Posted by: Anne Gibert | June 24, 2009 at 12:14 PM
(o)
Posted by: dale | June 27, 2009 at 09:21 PM