I've got this complicated thing about the concept of home.
I've probably mentioned it before. I've lived in more than 25 houses, apartments, flats, cars, youth hostels, and boats. First 23 years in California. Tried out Florida and college in Colorado. A 3-year tour of Latin America. Then big ol' Texas for half a decade.
No wonder I have so many postcards. But what about home?
For the past four years, I've lived in South Carolina - the most unlikely place of all. I mean, really. I thought I'd set up residence someplace like Patagonia or Mozambique before I'd catch myself with a mortgage in the Bible Belt.
Is home where you went to high school, or where your parents live? What if your parents moved away from your alma mater soon after graduation? Is their home now your home? Even if you don't live there?
Is home where you got married, or where you bought your first house together? What if you got all settled, started calling that place home more earnestly than you'd called a place since grade school, and then wound up divorced? And then your ex made it clear that the town - hell, the whole state of Texas - wasn't big enough for both of you? And that he wasn't the one gonna budge?
What if you fell in love at 41, with someone six states away, on the other side of the continent from where you were born? And since you had to get out of Texas anyway, you uprooted and transplanted in South Carolina, buying a house and everything. Is this place home now?
Whenever I contemplate it, I feel like a cross between Linda Blair and Sybil, my conflicting identities making my head wildly spin. There's no priest standing by to exorcise the ambivalence demon, so the only choice I have is to buy another piece of heavy furniture or plant a tree in the yard.
And it helps, but it doesn't quite strike home.
Just when I start feeling rooted to the southeast, I fly out to Colorado during summer vacation. I stay with my parents, who were born and grew up there, moved to California long enough to raise me, then returned "home" where they've lived ever since. The guest room where I sleep has the same yellow furniture they bought for my California bedroom circa 1974. Almost all of my relatives live in the state, cousins and uncles and aunts, people I've known my whole life. They don't know about my Linda Blairhead and split personality, about the pictures I take in the mountains I can't name, or the 40 postcards I buy in all the gift shops I visit. I act the same way I would in Paris, France, but my relatives never fail to ask, "So when are ya moving back?" As if I'm from there. As if Colorado is really my home.
When it's time to board the plane back to - where is it I live now? - the head starts revolving and my throat chokes. I don't want to fly away from this sort-of-home, from my extended kin and the friends I made in college and my mom and dad. But I'm also desperate to see my beloved back in South Carolina, and my dog, and the house I bought and even kind of like sometimes. Not to mention the only job I ever wanted to keep - the 36th one in my notoriously haphazard career. 
2 comments:
I can truly empathize with you on this one. I never felt like I belonged anywhere & nowhere was home. Three kids all born in different states, having no roots, & all having the gypsy gene didn't help. It felt like none of us had roots, only wings. Until now. I'd say home is where your heart tells you it is but your's is split so that doesn't help. How about home is that place where you just feel you belong there; in the stillness & quiet or among the din of family & friends, you feel 'happy & content'. When you settle somewhere & hear yourself say, "i don't want to leave here, ever", you know you're home.
Good luck with your journey & finding your "destination".
Not to be biased, but grab your man and come to Colorado!
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