Where is Home?
In the course of writing my current novel, I have given a great deal of thought to the notion of “HOME.” What does it mean? Where is it? Once lost, can it be regained? Does the meaning of “home” change as we age?
I recently had a discussion on this topic with a group ranging in age from 13 to 70. A few never left home and still live in a small village where their parents and grandparents were born. Others left home as adults, moving from one country and culture to another. Some left home voluntarily as teenagers, or they were uprooted by their parents, or by circumstance, and had no choice.
Home, for many, is the place they grew up, where every rock and every telephone pole is familiar. Where driving down the main street is a trip through memory lane. For some, the loss of home is a tragedy, while for others, losing one’s home turned out to be an opportunity to rebuild another life, another home.
There are those who think of themselves as having several homes. The place they were raised, or where childhood memories were created. Home is where they played and fought and went hiking with siblings, or where their own children were born or raised. Home is where they live with the people they love.
Some people felt that an experience, or the memory of an experience, was a kind of home, made real when the past is brought into the present. Walking hand in hand with their children along the beach where they vacationed as a child. Driving with an elbow out the open car window down the street where they went to high school. No matter that the beach is now built up and no longer pristine and isolated; no matter that the school they attended has been converted into condominiums. The experience persists, even if the location has changed.
Some people took issue with writer Thomas Wolfe’s words “You Can’t Go Home Again,” asking, what did he really mean? Why can’t you go home again? The answer has to do with the passage of time and the fact that few things stay the same. You can’t go home again because the home you left will have changed with time, and you will have changed even more. Someone who leaves home at the age of 20 and returns at 40 may find that the place looks the same. But she cannot be the same person she was when she left and will likely soon discover that the slot she once fitted so neatly into, fits no longer. She may be able to return, but when she arrives she will find that home is no longer where she left it.
Home is wherever one’s beloved is. Home is in the ocean. On the tennis court. Home is driving in any golf cart on any golf course in the world. Home is your rocking chair, wherever it may be, watching soaps or games or reality TV. Home is a season–winter, with snow on every branch and a blaze in the fireplace. Spring, sitting beneath the pink Japanese willow in full blossom, looking out at tulips and hyacinths planted the previous fall. Home is doing any of these things alone, or with your dog, or beside the one you love most in the world.
But places and people can be lost; memories can fade. Some people deal with this reality by learning to call many places home. Others are wise enough to have discovered that the only true home is one that cannot be lost. For them, home is not a place or a person or an experience outside themselves, but an internal space they carry everywhere they go. It is the place they decorate and protect like no other because they are inseparable from it. They know that if happiness and contentment cannot be found there, it can be found nowhere. These are the people whose contentment is written all over their faces, who don’t fight the weather or the traffic or the landscape. They are the truly blessed, for they are never far from Home.
Feature photo by Gus Ruballo on Unsplash
Other photos courtesy of the author