After my grandma died, my grandpa put new siding on their house. Now the small house is grey, instead of red. This bothered me. I didn’t know why.
Navy kids kind of grow up as vagabonds: they are untethered wanderers bouncing around from place to place. At least that felt like my experience while my dad was in the Navy. Like most Navy families, we moved often enough that it seemed we never had time to put down roots. Growing up, I always marveled at my friends with “hometowns” and the people who were “from” the place where they currently lived. I didn’t know where I was from. I’m still not sure. Are you from the place from which you last came or first came or what?
Semantic musings aside, when you open your newborn eyes to blink in the Italian sun and then when you first learn to talk your words come out in a Tennessee drawl and then when you drive your first car you almost hit a Pennsylvania Amish buggy… you may start to wonder where home really is. I think that’s why my grandparent’s house was so important to me: no matter what other places we left behind, that house was a place my family always went back to (besides the beach house that “blew away” in a hurricane). That’s why I could tentatively call it “home”.
And that home had been red ever since I could remember…and that red, along with the worn-thin green carpet and dust covered vases on the cupboard in the living room, was some sort of permanence within the constant change of life. Then my grandma died. Then my grandpa set the new t.v. up catty-cornered in the living room. Then he got new siding for the house.
I’d gone “home” to that house for nearly every major holiday. But it changed, and stopped feeling quite like home. Christmas there was weird. And too suddenly it seemed like I couldn’t go “home” anymore. And now, this year, we had Christmas at my aunt and uncle’s new house, eating ham under cathedral ceilings and wiping up spilled tea from the hardwood floors.
One autumn day in the car, I was talking to my mom about our Navy experience and about how I didn’t know how to answer when people asked where I was from and how I wasn’t even sure where home was. My mom paused before she replied, “Well, I always thought of home as being wherever we are.”
And that was it. It made sense: you make a home with people, not in places. Duh, I tell myself. That’s what family is (and how friends can become family). Because you make your home with the people you love, whether it be in one place or many, in a house, or on the streets. Wherever. Home is not a place. Home is when you can just look at someone and know you’re home, no matter where you are. Even in an anemone (Now I’m thinking of in Finding Nemo, when Dory says to Marlin: “When I look at you, I’m home.” :).
But that was really what bothered me about the house. Of course, I didn’t actually care about the siding. That small change just reminded me of the biggest change of the house: my grandma wasn’t there. And she was so much the type of person who made you feel like you were home when you were with her. Her ready hugs warmed you to your core. And the way her full-bellied chuckle erupted filled a room with joy. She was a laugher. And when you would tell a really good joke, she would give your arm a good slap and let out a snort. Making you feel like you just won the top prize of comedy. And then there was also just the way she knew you and cared just for you—remembering what all your favorite things were and always taking time to talk just to you no matter who else was in the room. Indeed, I would randomly get newspaper clippings, mostly of pigs and horses, in the mail that she would send just because they made her think of me.
But now, in that grey house, she is missing in every creak of the front door and in every shadow which isn’t hers that falls across the kitchen floor. She is missing. And I miss her. And the small red house turned grey is just not so much a home anymore.
So, what do you do when “home” just doesn’t feel like home any longer? Or you miss someone so much that you just feel homeless and homesick even when you’re in your most familiar house? Or what if any “home” you have is just a mess? Or what if you just don’t have anyone who makes you feel at home?
I wrote those words above over 10 years ago, but I have not found much to change in them. However, I have found thoughts to add, as I’ve continued through life to find myself both at home and homesick at times. Indeed, since I wrote the original essay– and after a life of not feeling the places I lived were home– I found a home snuck up on me. But I only realized that after I’d already left it and then found myself as a full-fledged adult living in a new place and wondering why it felt so weird. I spent my life moving to new places, so why was this different?
After much traipsing about and shining of flashlights into the unexplored corners of my soul, I realized why the place I had left– to go sail on ships and didn’t return to– was the most home a place had ever been to me: it was because it was a place filled with memories made with people I cared about… and full of important moments in my life. Indeed, I could hardly walk a street and not be reminded of someone dear to me or find a memory of the kid I was.
But I couldn’t go back. In so many ways. For one, my family was gone from there. It wouldn’t be home if I lived there without them. And the landscape changed: bulldozers leveled memories. And so many friends had moved on too. So, I found myself quite unexpectedly mourning a home I didn’t realize was home until it was a little late to truly appreciate it. Indeed, I could never live there knowing it was “home”. It was too late.
And the new place I found myself in was stark and empty without memories. When I went to the store, it wasn’t my brother’s friend from high school who checked out my groceries. When I walked past a fountain, it wasn’t the one my friends and I jumped in during a wholesome night of mayhem. When I walked down the street, it wasn’t the same street my dad and brother and I walked during a snowstorm to get to the movie rental place downtown, the snow covering the landscape in quiet as it erased the tracks we made in our impromptu and unnecessary quest. Indeed, this new place was so empty and I finally realized the memories I was building there weren’t filling it up because I was making so many memories alone: I wasn’t filling this new place with memories of people I loved. And to be honest, memorable things just don’t happen as much on your own. But even in hanging out with the people I love in new places, memories build in a different way as an adult and having more separate lives. There is definitely something to growing up somewhere, even if just for a relatively short time. As a child, your life just intertwines with your family in a different way.
Indeed, it took 12 years to fill the town I’d left with enough memories to feel the weight of home in the summer breeze that would blow through the windows of our house, swaying the paper snowflakes I refused to take down after our Elf party. Those snowflakes were how friends could be assured which house was mine, if they hadn’t yet been there and gotten measured on the wall of heights I kept in the kitchen. That wall of heights recording the visits of family friends was the last thing my parents painted over when they put the house up for sale. How would a place ever be home to me again?
When I was growing up, I thought my favorite place was the beach. And I thought when I grew up, that I would move to the same beach that I grew up vacationing at with my family. I loved that place, after all. Why not live there? I fantasized about living in the very house my family always rented. But when that house was torn down after a hurricane, I really started to think about what that house truly meant to me. And I realized it wasn’t the house I loved… and it wasn’t even the beach that I loved, as much as I enjoy a balmy breeze. But those places truly were just pleasant holders of memories: they were places that felt like home because they were filled with memories of those I loved.
Indeed, I realized that what I loved about the beach was sharing life with my family…. grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, and sisters filling up a space with love and laughter amid empty pop cans and empty bags of Nacho Doritos. Truly, if I moved to the beach without my family, I would just be sad. As I would just miss the people I loved even while looking up at the stars peeking through the clouds of a storm rolling in over the ocean and I would turn to an empty rocking chair where my Grandma Ginny should be.
Places can be home. But only because of love.
My grandpa died years ago now too and my aunt took up the green, worn carpet– life having treaded the fibers down to their threads. So much more has changed in that house. But my Aunt used her decorating skills to sprinkle the house with objects of memory, reminders of home. From the wooden, hand painted cutouts labeled with the names of me and my cousins hanging under the words “home is where the heart is”, to the black and white pictures of loved faces and the remainder of collected vases, interspersed in a retro theme that makes the original rotary phone in the kitchen somehow not seem out of place. She decorated the home with love in a way that preserves it even in its strange newness. Which just reinforces the thought that love makes a home.
Places can be home. But only because of love.
And that is what saved Christmas for me as well, in the strangeness of moving family Christmas to my Aunt and Uncle’s home: it was still a house full of love and the people I love. It felt strange to have Christmas there and sometimes still does. And it will never be the same type of home as that little, red house simply because I have no childhood memories there and no memories of long-gone family. But what matters most about the little red house I miss is still found in the din of familiar voices echoing in the cathedral ceilings and in the patter of feet on the hardwood floors of my aunt and uncle’s house. I am still surrounded by faces I love on Christmas. I am still home for Christmas simply because I am with the people I love.
But again, what does one do if they do not have a home like that? Home may be with the people you love, or in the physical spaces filled with memories of those people. But people leave and houses crumble. Does that mean home can be lost to us forever?
When I first wrote this essay, I felt compelled to ask and answer the questions above because it seemed callous to wax poetic about home when the world can be so lonely for people. And some people do not even have families. So, I tried to explore more of the concept of home rather than type up a tidy little essay. But the catch is that once I get all existential or try to talk about things on a deeper level, I just can’t help but to talk about Jesus. And that actually got me unfriended on Facebook (and in life!) when I first posted this essay. Which also made me step back from writing for quite a while as I processed that, if I write what is true and authentic to me… people will reject me. And it wouldn’t just be a superficial rejection, but a rejection of the “real me”. But part of what makes the world such a lonely place sometimes is that people won’t be real with each other precisely because they fear rejection… and so there is no true connection. So, I will get all existential here again and talk about Jesus, too. But I just want to warn you.
So… one idea I have been thinking a lot about this past year is “the dream behind the dream”, which is the idea that our dreams and longings which we are aware we have in life and are able to articulate are actually products of deeper longings which are beyond our capabilities to name. But these un-nameable longings do have knowable intermediary longings which we can unearth if we take a closer look at our hopes and dreams. That is to say, we are comfortable naming things we want as though they are what we truly want, when in reality, those things we think we want are actually means to a deeper end which are not so much a topic of normal conversation.
For example, it is common to hope and dream for romantic love. But what lies beyond that hope? Is it not frequently actually a hope for a sense of wholeness and belonging? But we tell ourselves, “I’d really like to meet someone” rather than “I’d really like to feel whole and like I belong.”(Of course romantic love is not actually a path to wholeness, but that’s a whole other essay! But also, just because romantic love isn’t the fulfillment we might want it to be, doesn’t mean it isn’t something worth having…). Another common dream is of success and recognition, be it professional or artistic or some other form of success. But is it really the success that people want? Or is it actually that they are seeking a sense of worthiness and acceptance? (Similarly, I don’t think success is the simple path to worthiness and acceptance that people would like it to be…). People also dream of making money. But do they want money? Or do they want security and the opportunity for life options which might lead to a greater sense of fulfillment?
Is it not that in all we are seeking we are ultimately just seeking soul feelings? But rather than name and speak and seek these feelings, we subconsciously attach them to external achievements, possessions, and status? But I also think those soul feelings– feelings of love, acceptance, belonging, fulfillment, peace, joy, etc.— can all be thought of as culminating in the feeling of “wholeness”. We are ultimately seeking wholeness. Always and in some way. Which begs the question, why aren’t we whole?
For all of the joy and beauty and goodness that can be found in life, our existence all too often is still one of lack and longing and fleeting satisfactions. Our times are spent in fleeting fulness… fleeting “enoughness”. Even just on a physical level, for all the times we are full and rested, how often are we hungry and tired? And on more of a soul level, for all the times we feel loved, joyful, at peace, etc. how often have we felt lonely and sad and troubled? Why are our lives ones of never quite enough? Why are our lives full of a longing for wholeness? A longing for home? Because isn’t “home” really about feeling a sense of love and belonging and a type of wholeness too? Indeed, especially metaphorically, home sometimes can even be thought of a culmination of all that we’ve searched for.
I’ve thought this before and I doubt it is an original thought to me, but I have long taken comfort in the idea that longings, however deep, have something real which answers them. I think there is a soul parallel to the physical world where we are hungry because we are meant for food, we are tired because we are meant for sleep… so why would it not be that we are lonely because we are meant for love or we are homesick because we are meant for home?
St. Augustine once said of God, “our hearts are restless until we rest in thee”. And to be honest, I feel the same way as that 1600 year old monk. Especially as, in all of my struggles growing up with feeling out of place, as both the new and eccentric kid, and not quite at home, I realized that beneath it all and deep in my soul I actually did and do have a near abiding sense of feeling loved and at peace, of having joy and feeling worthy and enough. I’ve actually had that sense since I was about 3 or 4 years old and just had the strong conviction that Jesus loved me and decided I would follow him. I’ve always been more existential in my experience of Jesus than religious or cultural. For me, my connection to Jesus has always been about the longings of my soul.
I know that’s weird to a lot of people, but all I can do is be honest. I mean, how could I discuss home and all these feelings and the existential crisis of life and not admit that? Indeed, sometimes I lose connection with that sense of well-being in my interactions and experiences in the world around me. But throughout life I have still found that if I turn my attention to my relationship with Jesus, that abiding sense of wholeness is still there. Always waiting for me. Jesus truly feels like my truest home, my dream within my dreams. Though even in that sense of wholeness, there still seems something incomplete still living in a world where homes of people and houses can still crumble.
And I just can’t write about “home” without saying all that. But I also didn’t write about home just so I could talk about Jesus, too. The concept of home is just something I’ve struggled with and thought about for most my life. And I warned you I would talk about Jesus 🙂 That is my struggle to be a writer and to be authentic: I don’t actually want to talk about things I know so many people don’t want to hear… I would be perfectly fine keeping my interior life to myself if not for my conviction to write my honest thoughts and experiences. So please just imagine it is 3 a.m. and we are sitting on the kitchen floor talking about life– as is my past time, back when I thought it was fun to stay up late!– and this discussion won’t seem so out of place. Because, indeed, in a world full of posturing, we don’t really talk about these type of things so much, do we? But maybe it is not because we are shallow… but because it is better not to regularly plunge ourselves into existential crisis… 🙂
Anyhow, regardless of your beliefs or the answers you come up with, the concept of home is a way of understanding the human experience, an experience we live in the tension between absence and wholeness. So… where, or who, do you call home? What are you really seeking when you seek home?
Merry existential Christmas 🙂
Because, indeed, going “home” for the holidays is not always a simple thing, if it ever was. Whether a physical “home” does not feel quite like home because it is missing the presence of people who once were home to you, or if you are missing a space that held together a sense of home by being a holder of your memories– the voices and faces of those you loved evoked in the patched wall at the end of the hallway or found in a scratch on the parquet floor of the kitchen or in the dim light coming through the small, high window of a back bedroom. Nothing can stir homesickness quite like Christmas in a different place or with different faces than the homes you knew. But I hope if you feel any sort of homesickness this Christmas, that you let it remind you that you were meant for home. You were meant for love and belonging. And while too much of life may not seem like this when people go hungry and lonely, somehow I truly do believe that the things we are meant for will always find us, one way or another. Which is just a bigger discussion than I can get into here… so, this Christmas, I simply wish you home 🙂