Home is a complicated concept for me. I've never been a team spirit kind of person or felt allegiance or the need for tribute to particular places. I don’t wear school colors, root for professional home teams, attend staff outings, Weight Watchers, or Toastmasters. Places, rather, belonging to places or things isn’t sacred to me. Nature, history, people, spirits of places are sacred to me.
I spent my childhood planning to leave my hometown, go off to college and then live in a big city. I did that. And here I am, blogging about wanting to return home.
My hometown, even though born and raised there, has never been home for me. It’s a small, rural community in a string of small towns following the main roads of the area. I’ve never felt comfortable, wanted, or attached. I have no desire at this time to move back to my hometown and can’t shake a deep cynicism for this community.
Going home, to my hometown, really has nothing to do with my yearning for home. It’s, of course, Proust’s madeleine, a cache of sensations, memories, known things I carry with me, but can never get back to.
I haven’t been, felt home since my first move when I was 14. After a series of crises, we moved out of the home I’d grown up in and then moved twice more before my parents built a house after I started college.
I frequently visit my parent’s home in the country. I sit in the backyard on a patio chair amongst flowers and vegetables and listen to the wind, birds, my kids playing. I’ve visited many times over the years, but I haven’t been home, existed in a place of hearth and home, in decades. This is where I need to go.
A return to my roots is a return to my ancestors (stories of my great aunts and uncles, great grandmother, friends and workers together, singing on the front porch after dinner), to family, the earth. Grounding myself, I guess. Eliot says, “home is where we all start from” and I just want to restart. To scrub myself of all the accumulated crap, lies, fortifications and return to me. I want to return to or become a reader version of me, like the Essential Modernist Authors or The Kristeva Reader, Best American Short Stories. Something that contains and distills and clarifies.
I keep expecting munchkins to show up and tell me to follow the Yellow Brick Road. But damn, the road is so unknowable and lonely.
I spent my childhood planning to leave my hometown, go off to college and then live in a big city. I did that. And here I am, blogging about wanting to return home.
My hometown, even though born and raised there, has never been home for me. It’s a small, rural community in a string of small towns following the main roads of the area. I’ve never felt comfortable, wanted, or attached. I have no desire at this time to move back to my hometown and can’t shake a deep cynicism for this community.
Going home, to my hometown, really has nothing to do with my yearning for home. It’s, of course, Proust’s madeleine, a cache of sensations, memories, known things I carry with me, but can never get back to.
I haven’t been, felt home since my first move when I was 14. After a series of crises, we moved out of the home I’d grown up in and then moved twice more before my parents built a house after I started college.
I frequently visit my parent’s home in the country. I sit in the backyard on a patio chair amongst flowers and vegetables and listen to the wind, birds, my kids playing. I’ve visited many times over the years, but I haven’t been home, existed in a place of hearth and home, in decades. This is where I need to go.
A return to my roots is a return to my ancestors (stories of my great aunts and uncles, great grandmother, friends and workers together, singing on the front porch after dinner), to family, the earth. Grounding myself, I guess. Eliot says, “home is where we all start from” and I just want to restart. To scrub myself of all the accumulated crap, lies, fortifications and return to me. I want to return to or become a reader version of me, like the Essential Modernist Authors or The Kristeva Reader, Best American Short Stories. Something that contains and distills and clarifies.
I keep expecting munchkins to show up and tell me to follow the Yellow Brick Road. But damn, the road is so unknowable and lonely.