Over the years I’ve learned that there is a huge range of meaning in that puny little word Home.
That broad spectrum has been on my mind a lot during the last couple of weeks.
Early this month my parents visited an apartment complex near where a couple of my sisters live, and shortly after the visit we got a phone call from Mom and Dad to let us know they’d put a deposit on an apartment and would be moving from the house they’ve lived in for a couple of solid decades plus. This wasn’t truly a stunner: it’s something we had all discussed in various ways and at various levels of intensity over the last couple of years. After all, moving was kind of on our minds. My husband and I have changed addresses four times in the last seven or eight years, thrice by short distances for more practical-seeming digs and once across the country for a change of work life. Amid those moves of ours, my mother and father-in-law got on the moving-truck bandwagon and shifted from their own many-years’ home to an apartment as well.
For us the moves were partly logic-driven (so we hope at all times!) and always emotion-driven. No regrets on any of them; they were all the right thing at the time in their own ways. I think Mom and Dad S are satisfied with their life-shift too, and I sincerely hope Mom and Dad W will find as much good in the balance as well. I know surely enough that every gain tends to be accompanied by some tradeoffs, large or small. That’s life. I just spent a few days on a dash-through with my parents to assist with part of the sorting and packing and organization and shopping and networking that their move requires. It’s little enough that I can do, but it always unearths a whole slew of things–objects and thoughts–that center on the Homely concept and how it may differ for each of us and can also change over time.
What I think of most distinctly and frequently in this whole house-related context is of course that thing I mentioned about the meanings of Home.
I’m sitting in the centerpiece of what makes Home for me right now: a very comfortable house in a nice town, and most importantly, cozily perched next to my life partner, love, best friend–my husbandly-type person. Only the tiniest bit of elementary observation necessary to see that this combination provides a goodly batch of Home definitions straight off: physical shelter; a place to centralize my daily existence; comfort and safety and a sense (however delusional) of control over my life and environment. It’s a concrete expression of my sense of how I fit in the world and the pleasures I take in it. It’s a container for my current life story and my history, both personal and in the far broader ways of culture and roots and outright humanity. That’s where I begin to veer off into that lifelong learning curve of what Home means to me.
I think of arriving on Norwegian soil for the first time when I was twenty and being overwhelmed by the sensation of being rooted, blood-connected, of holding hands with my ancestors, in a way that caught me utterly by surprise. I think of listening to my grandparents and aunts and uncles unfurling their memories over me in my childhood and youth and how those people were my Home as much as anything in those days and in turn, the way that learning those bits of family and personal history further shaped my understanding of this whole construct. I think not only of all my grandparents and great-grandparents braving new worlds to create Home in America after uprooting from Norway, to build a new self or job or family or place or all of those things.
I think of my grandfather moving his family back to his hometown in Norway when my mother and her next sister were still very small, seeking a re-creation of Home as he had known it, but ultimately finding that place didn’t fulfill the need as much as his wife and children and his suddenly faraway life did, so with his homesick young spouse in the lead, headed back to the States with their little pinafore-clad girls to restart their own Home on their own coast. And I think of my youngest sister searching out the family history’s effects on her own notion of Home and landing, of all places, in a beautiful Norwegian city where some of Grandpa’s relatives still live and where she’s now been rooted back among them for over twenty-five years.
All of this, jumbled and tumbled together, is what makes Home for me, but the center–the linchpin and the heart of it all–is unquestionably love. Wherever it’s located, however it’s designed, whatever it might constitute in the physical world, Home is clearly all about that connection shared with what and whomever we love most. And that will probably never change for me.
Is it a bug or beast that’s plaguing you, or is it all just self-imposed? Does it really matter? Fear, anger and other poisonous emotions are just as toxic as can be, and I know if I give my own worst self power over the rest of me, I’ve no one else to blame. Inner pest, outer pest: under attack I fold, I wither and the result is pretty much the same.
Art-Colored Glasses 