The Practical Free Spirit

Between the time I moved out of my childhood home to go to college when I was eighteen and when my husband and I bought and moved into my current house, I lived in eleven different places, with a few short stops at two of my dad’s houses along the way (summers and the transitional period post-living abroad).  Eleven different homes in twelve years.

I began thinking about what makes a home for me when I read Theodora Goss’s interesting essay entitled The Idea of Home.  I’ve had the opposite experience from her, in that in spite of all that moving (and don’t get me started on how much I abhor moving), I rarely felt homeless or like I was searching for a home.  I was searching for something, that’s for sure, but home wasn’t it.  I settled fairly easily into each new apartment, creating my own special retreat from the world.

I remember worrying about not having a home, though.  It must have been soon after I left for college, and I realized I had left my childhood home behind more or less for good (I spent my entire childhood in the same house).  Due to my artistic and traveling tendencies, I thought it was quite possible I’d be spending a lot of time either moving or on the road.  So I asked my mom to make me something that would symbolize home for me, something portable that I could carry with me wherever I went.

Here is the collage she created for me:

Home, by Carol Sundberg

So what does home represent?  Warmth, love, safety, comfort.  A place to let your mind spread out and dream.  A place where you can be completely yourself.

I don’t know when I realized that if I could achieve those ideas, any space became home.  Perhaps it was because I had no choice about looking back.  My old home gradually disintegrated: my mom, who embodied home more for me than anything or anyone else, died; the childhood house was sold; most of my old things were sold or donated or thrown away, a few of which I still regret ten years later; my dog died.  When I would say, “I want to go home,” I would still mean it, but I had no idea what I was even talking about.

And yet the idea of home has always been important to me, so I did what I could to create new homes wherever I went.  Home was a room where I could close the door and be alone.  Home was a place with my favorite books and either a piano keyboard or full-fledged piano.  Home was tea and toast and ice cream always in the freezer.  Home was where I could acknowledge to myself exactly who I was and how I felt.  Home was where my memories lived.

In every place I lived, I found something to love.  Often it was the trees outside my window, pine or redwood, or a distant corner of the sea visible if I stood on tip-toe.  It was the cats who lived there, or the ramshackle hodgepodge of books and papers, or the mismatched furniture.  It was the large expanses of empty carpeting, the guitar leaning on the wall, my warm green woolen blanket.  It was the roses growing out front, or the acoustics in the family room, or the colors of the walls.

Home was the lingering remains of my mom’s hugs, the ones that told me better than anything else that things were going to be okay.

Home is still all those things, and now it is also my husband and my little dog.  Home, for me, isn’t so much a physical place as a place inside of me, a feeling to which I try to give physical manifestation.  It’s comforting to know that I carry the seed of home wherever I go.