I reach for a book, wipe dust off the top, pile it on the previous one, and reach for the next. Once I clear a shelf, I dust it then replace the books and move to the next bookshelf. Summertime spring cleaning. I remember my mother teaching me to keep house, my father, too. Dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, washing, vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms and kitchen, wiping down ceilings and walls, cleaning out the refrigerator, breezeway, and garage, weeding the garden, picking berries and vegetables, and in winter, shoveling snow. Chores that my parents could have done themselves in less time and with better results. But housekeeping was not the only lesson. My parents also taught me how to make a home, to labor for the sake of love and relationship. We can’t help but long for the homes we’ve left, the ones our parents made and those we established for ourselves, our families, in our churches, towns and neighborhoods. Even though we know our homes like us will perish, we take up the routines and rhythms of homemaking. Dusting bookcases and wringing good from what is.
My mother is 93, failing yet spirited. Everywhere she has lived feels like home to me. I pass the house in which she spent her childhood 83 and more years ago, and feel the heart-tug while I wonder who lives there now. I look on Zillow for the house in which I lived from age nine to eighteen (well, twenty-one if you don't call a college dorm home ... which I didn't), then again from thirty-one to thirty-three after a divorce. I lived off and on in her retirement-home apartment over the last four years, when a fall or illness meant she had to stay in the health care unit for a while. I lived there to help her in the small ways one does when a family member is ill, and to take care of her beloved German Shepherd, Sage. It felt like home then.
Mom is full-time in health care now, her apartment sold to another elderly widow. I still think of it as Mom's. And, in a way, mine. The last place that, because my mother has lived there, feels like home to me.
In the health care wing, she has a lovely, large room that's big enough to accommodate some of the 150-year-old heirloom furniture brought by her mother, after WWII, from Yorkshire, England.
She doesn't think of that room, as personal and comfortable as we have tried to make it, as her home. Neither do I. No, it's a chariot, swinging low.
I dream about the house all the time, my home of 18 years. I find myself floating through each room- I remember every corner of it. There were so many moments that marked it as a family home. But it was my dad who made it memorable. He took great pride in being able to care for us, give us a lovely home, and safety and security during the war years and we were able to summer at the seashore. We always celebrated Christmas with a huge tree that touched the ceiling, and the greatest Lionel train set he had collected running around and through the gifts placed around the tree.
I remember our first console in 1947 with a black and white TV, radio, and phonograph. Every Sunday he would play classical recordings which were only grooved on one side. There was a Steinway piano in the living room and as soon as he came home he would begin playing not only his own songs but those of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter, and I would be lulled to sleep. To this day I can break into songs which fit any emotional occasion.
When I left home so blithely, I did not fully understand what I was giving up in exchange for my “freedom”. The many moves I made over the course of my life are head spinning to consider, however finally I have found that special setting in which to build a home for me and my family and feel rooted and secure as in the past.
Clearly you CAN go home again. Having lived my adult life outside of Boston, now at 64, my husband and I are back living in Maine, four miles from the home where I grew up, where my father still lives. I ride my bike up our road and then take a right onto Mere Point, the road to my father’s house, my childhood home. I ride past the now run down house that used to be pink and well manicured, where the other Karen, Karen P., with pink glasses I was jealous of, would board the schoolbus. I ride past the farmhouse with the hidden passages, where the twins lived, where the three of us played away many happy afternoons. I have double vision on this road, childhood, middle age, then and now, flickering, toggling.
Sometimes, driving home from food shopping in town, lost in thought, I keep driving down Mere Point towards my father’s, forgeting to turn on to our road. When I notice I turn around, making the left onto Pleasant Hill, arriving at our peaceful home in the woods, familiar smells from childhood, of marsh and mudflats wafting in, David, out front tending the vegetables or putting gas in the tractor will come help carry groceries, Coby will trot out to greet me
I’ve loved creating a home. It’s a house, for me, one that I’ve had fun painting, and landscaping, and in which the furniture might be moved at any moment.
My daughters and I have lived here for 18 years - longer even than the places I lived with my extremely stable parents.
18 years! I’d never have believed it. Now that I’m ready to shed the house, what happens to the home? I’d like to think that my real home is in the relationships I’ve forged.
But you can’t lie down on friendship when night falls and you’re ready to sleep.
I will always need shelter, but will I always need a residence to call my home? Can I be at home in the world? In any corner of the world I inhabit, if even for a day?
All houses are haunted, by the living and the dead.
Almost all my life, I haven't felt safe in any home I've lived in. Now that I'm 30, I still struggle to trust that homes can be safe. For me, home wasn't one static place where a family lived. Those homes felt judgemental, with awful stories etched in each corner, in each room. No, I view home as any place I am safely occupying. I feel more at home in others' homes, in communal living.
But a home CAN be safe, and I look forward to making the home that I always wanted--needed--as a kid.
My childhood home, the only one, Mom’s, is the last exit in Iowa before you hit Missouri on the I-35.
Mom moved to the Midwest in the 1960’s. She found a peace in wide-open horizons. She stayed. I’ve had the same house since I was born, returning my whole life, always an anchor to my wandering. This is a luxury, having only one house. Home can be anywhere when you have this secure security. So, of course I moved overseas after I graduated from high school. With that decision, I learned how to make a home wherever I'd go.
As an outsider, far from home, you are aware of this fact. You take considerable consideration when encountering locals. To be an outsider is not a choice, nor never far away. When you respect the inevitability of your status, locals take you in, make you their own. This is the way to roll.
Our home rustles, from the curtain of trees outside every window in the living room and bedroom.
It sings all day and strangely, all night.
When the windows are closed, birds often line up peering in. Once a magpie strutted up and down like a brazen burglar. In a heat wave, we keep the curtains closed, and bird shadows loom on the old fabric. Surely it’s only a matter of time before sparrows and parakeets swoop through the rooms?
Our home is on a corner, so we can watch the sky change colour from different angles. I lie in bed taking in the wide open space; the glint of water in the wetlands; twinkling new builds on the other side.
On New Year’s Eve, we rushed from one window to the next, watching a halo of fireworks crackle above the London skyline.
In the winter, it’s damp. In summer, it’s suffocating. It’s a shit flat. It’s too expensive. But every summer I hold my breath, hoping they’ll extend the tenancy for another year, while my boyfriend says, ‘We’ll just find somewhere better.’ But we won’t. I’ve looked.
My husband and I began selling off all out worldly possessions in the Spring of 2022, all in an effort for our plans to move to Lisbon, Portugal in the Spring of 2022.
Our home of 11 years had plenty of things, too many things in fact as I weeded through the inventory. Through this process, I realized, I used to think of a home as a place where you put your things. The more things within, the more it was home. The process of selling off almost every last thing over a year made me realize that that was false...and while I sit in a rented apartment Lisbon, I know it now in my heart of hearts.
My real HOME is anywhere that I am happy, safe and with my husband. That truly is home for me now and it took 59 years to reach this truth.
Soon I’ll fly across the Atlantic to see family in my hometown. This will include a visit to the house I grew up in, after our then intact family moved there when I was around two years old. Though I haven’t lived there for nearly forty years, somehow it still feels like home. There are so many memories. Discovering delicious flavors in the kitchen, playing for hours alone in the outfitted basement, unpacking the beautiful nativity set to place beneath our plastic Christmas tree, lying upside down on wavy chaise longue listening to Casey’s Top 40. Blocks of small rowhouses with neat front yards, Mr. Henry selling fresh produce from his truck, roller skating down the one-way street in summer, walking to the shopping center – before it succumbed to neglect and crime. But also: being slapped over a broken glass, Mom threatening Dad with a kitchen knife, and me leaving for good after a fight over a pot of rice that stood for so much more. A spot inside me is afraid of what awaits my visit. Afraid of the criticism I will hear upon entering it, and the air of disappointment that will linger once I leave again.
If you asked me to draw my childhood home today, I’d draw a coffin. Maybe a mausoleum, although there’s something homey about those (thanks, Buffy). And for me, home was not homey, not cozy, not safe and welcoming. The two homes of my youth are bleak and airless in my memory, shallow graves where I felt simultaneously alone and smothered.
When my husband asks me how I feel about buying the house we’re currently renting, I can’t speak around the ghosts in my throat. I don’t know what it is to make a home. Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve come to feel trapped in, repulsed by myself — my impulsive purchases and my tendency to hoard in hopes of embodying some quilted image of Prepared Adult, my enraged aversion to cleaning, the disconnect between my vision and execution.
My husband sees a home in this house. It's not just this house, either. Even in empty plots of land, he imagines a future of building and tinkering. It's like he's gazing into the crystal ball and seeing our future, while all I can do is stare at my own reflection, shrunken and upside down, stuck in glass I can't break.
Home to me is a safe place where my parents surrounded us with fun things and family and holiday dinners. I had 4 homes that I have memories of before buying my own home.
I can say that the 3rd home, the one I spent most of my childhood and teen years in was my favorite. Was it because of those memories, the innocent years? Was it because I liked the style of the house? Was it because I had friends in the neighborhood? Was it because I had the big bedroom all to my self?
I can also say the last house, was my least favorite, the big house. The one my father was so proud of. Why didnt I like this house? Was it because my teen years were uprooted to move to another town? Was it because I didn't have friends in the neighborhood now? Was it because I didnt like the style of the house?
Afterall my family was still there, we were still still surrounded by fun things, we still had holiday dinners with family. I still had my own bedroom.
But I must admit the first house that I bought with my late husband was my favorite. My favorite style, a house with a lot if charm and character. Mine to do exactly what I wanted to. My holiday dinners with family. It was the house I made a home.
When people ask me where I'm from, I don't have an answer. I never really felt at home anywhere. I lived in several places, about 12, not counting temporary residences. As a newborn, we lived with my grandparents. Four years later we moved into our own house one street over. When I was 6, my grandparents moved away, which was the end of the world for me. I spent every weekend and holidays with my grandparents. But I had to leave this homely place again and again. My parents always had to drag me into the car. After that, I moved 3 more times until I went to university.
When I studied in Heidelberg, I felt very comfortable in my student flat, but it only was a temporary home. When I finished my studies, I wanted to stay in Heidelberg, but I had existential fears without a plan. I left Heidelberg. At that point I developed life-threatening food allergies.
After graduating, I moved 6 more times. Among them was my life partner, with whom I'm together for 14 years now. I never wanted to buy a house, because I didn't know where, there was never that one place. Until a certain moment in my life.
I reach for a book, wipe dust off the top, pile it on the previous one, and reach for the next. Once I clear a shelf, I dust it then replace the books and move to the next bookshelf. Summertime spring cleaning. I remember my mother teaching me to keep house, my father, too. Dusting, sweeping, scrubbing, washing, vacuuming, cleaning bathrooms and kitchen, wiping down ceilings and walls, cleaning out the refrigerator, breezeway, and garage, weeding the garden, picking berries and vegetables, and in winter, shoveling snow. Chores that my parents could have done themselves in less time and with better results. But housekeeping was not the only lesson. My parents also taught me how to make a home, to labor for the sake of love and relationship. We can’t help but long for the homes we’ve left, the ones our parents made and those we established for ourselves, our families, in our churches, towns and neighborhoods. Even though we know our homes like us will perish, we take up the routines and rhythms of homemaking. Dusting bookcases and wringing good from what is.
My mother is 93, failing yet spirited. Everywhere she has lived feels like home to me. I pass the house in which she spent her childhood 83 and more years ago, and feel the heart-tug while I wonder who lives there now. I look on Zillow for the house in which I lived from age nine to eighteen (well, twenty-one if you don't call a college dorm home ... which I didn't), then again from thirty-one to thirty-three after a divorce. I lived off and on in her retirement-home apartment over the last four years, when a fall or illness meant she had to stay in the health care unit for a while. I lived there to help her in the small ways one does when a family member is ill, and to take care of her beloved German Shepherd, Sage. It felt like home then.
Mom is full-time in health care now, her apartment sold to another elderly widow. I still think of it as Mom's. And, in a way, mine. The last place that, because my mother has lived there, feels like home to me.
In the health care wing, she has a lovely, large room that's big enough to accommodate some of the 150-year-old heirloom furniture brought by her mother, after WWII, from Yorkshire, England.
She doesn't think of that room, as personal and comfortable as we have tried to make it, as her home. Neither do I. No, it's a chariot, swinging low.
I dream about the house all the time, my home of 18 years. I find myself floating through each room- I remember every corner of it. There were so many moments that marked it as a family home. But it was my dad who made it memorable. He took great pride in being able to care for us, give us a lovely home, and safety and security during the war years and we were able to summer at the seashore. We always celebrated Christmas with a huge tree that touched the ceiling, and the greatest Lionel train set he had collected running around and through the gifts placed around the tree.
I remember our first console in 1947 with a black and white TV, radio, and phonograph. Every Sunday he would play classical recordings which were only grooved on one side. There was a Steinway piano in the living room and as soon as he came home he would begin playing not only his own songs but those of Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Cole Porter, and I would be lulled to sleep. To this day I can break into songs which fit any emotional occasion.
When I left home so blithely, I did not fully understand what I was giving up in exchange for my “freedom”. The many moves I made over the course of my life are head spinning to consider, however finally I have found that special setting in which to build a home for me and my family and feel rooted and secure as in the past.
Clearly you CAN go home again. Having lived my adult life outside of Boston, now at 64, my husband and I are back living in Maine, four miles from the home where I grew up, where my father still lives. I ride my bike up our road and then take a right onto Mere Point, the road to my father’s house, my childhood home. I ride past the now run down house that used to be pink and well manicured, where the other Karen, Karen P., with pink glasses I was jealous of, would board the schoolbus. I ride past the farmhouse with the hidden passages, where the twins lived, where the three of us played away many happy afternoons. I have double vision on this road, childhood, middle age, then and now, flickering, toggling.
Sometimes, driving home from food shopping in town, lost in thought, I keep driving down Mere Point towards my father’s, forgeting to turn on to our road. When I notice I turn around, making the left onto Pleasant Hill, arriving at our peaceful home in the woods, familiar smells from childhood, of marsh and mudflats wafting in, David, out front tending the vegetables or putting gas in the tractor will come help carry groceries, Coby will trot out to greet me
Is home a place, or a state of mind?
I’ve loved creating a home. It’s a house, for me, one that I’ve had fun painting, and landscaping, and in which the furniture might be moved at any moment.
My daughters and I have lived here for 18 years - longer even than the places I lived with my extremely stable parents.
18 years! I’d never have believed it. Now that I’m ready to shed the house, what happens to the home? I’d like to think that my real home is in the relationships I’ve forged.
But you can’t lie down on friendship when night falls and you’re ready to sleep.
I will always need shelter, but will I always need a residence to call my home? Can I be at home in the world? In any corner of the world I inhabit, if even for a day?
All houses are haunted, by the living and the dead.
Almost all my life, I haven't felt safe in any home I've lived in. Now that I'm 30, I still struggle to trust that homes can be safe. For me, home wasn't one static place where a family lived. Those homes felt judgemental, with awful stories etched in each corner, in each room. No, I view home as any place I am safely occupying. I feel more at home in others' homes, in communal living.
But a home CAN be safe, and I look forward to making the home that I always wanted--needed--as a kid.
My childhood home, the only one, Mom’s, is the last exit in Iowa before you hit Missouri on the I-35.
Mom moved to the Midwest in the 1960’s. She found a peace in wide-open horizons. She stayed. I’ve had the same house since I was born, returning my whole life, always an anchor to my wandering. This is a luxury, having only one house. Home can be anywhere when you have this secure security. So, of course I moved overseas after I graduated from high school. With that decision, I learned how to make a home wherever I'd go.
As an outsider, far from home, you are aware of this fact. You take considerable consideration when encountering locals. To be an outsider is not a choice, nor never far away. When you respect the inevitability of your status, locals take you in, make you their own. This is the way to roll.
Our home rustles, from the curtain of trees outside every window in the living room and bedroom.
It sings all day and strangely, all night.
When the windows are closed, birds often line up peering in. Once a magpie strutted up and down like a brazen burglar. In a heat wave, we keep the curtains closed, and bird shadows loom on the old fabric. Surely it’s only a matter of time before sparrows and parakeets swoop through the rooms?
Our home is on a corner, so we can watch the sky change colour from different angles. I lie in bed taking in the wide open space; the glint of water in the wetlands; twinkling new builds on the other side.
On New Year’s Eve, we rushed from one window to the next, watching a halo of fireworks crackle above the London skyline.
In the winter, it’s damp. In summer, it’s suffocating. It’s a shit flat. It’s too expensive. But every summer I hold my breath, hoping they’ll extend the tenancy for another year, while my boyfriend says, ‘We’ll just find somewhere better.’ But we won’t. I’ve looked.
My husband and I began selling off all out worldly possessions in the Spring of 2022, all in an effort for our plans to move to Lisbon, Portugal in the Spring of 2022.
Our home of 11 years had plenty of things, too many things in fact as I weeded through the inventory. Through this process, I realized, I used to think of a home as a place where you put your things. The more things within, the more it was home. The process of selling off almost every last thing over a year made me realize that that was false...and while I sit in a rented apartment Lisbon, I know it now in my heart of hearts.
My real HOME is anywhere that I am happy, safe and with my husband. That truly is home for me now and it took 59 years to reach this truth.
Soon I’ll fly across the Atlantic to see family in my hometown. This will include a visit to the house I grew up in, after our then intact family moved there when I was around two years old. Though I haven’t lived there for nearly forty years, somehow it still feels like home. There are so many memories. Discovering delicious flavors in the kitchen, playing for hours alone in the outfitted basement, unpacking the beautiful nativity set to place beneath our plastic Christmas tree, lying upside down on wavy chaise longue listening to Casey’s Top 40. Blocks of small rowhouses with neat front yards, Mr. Henry selling fresh produce from his truck, roller skating down the one-way street in summer, walking to the shopping center – before it succumbed to neglect and crime. But also: being slapped over a broken glass, Mom threatening Dad with a kitchen knife, and me leaving for good after a fight over a pot of rice that stood for so much more. A spot inside me is afraid of what awaits my visit. Afraid of the criticism I will hear upon entering it, and the air of disappointment that will linger once I leave again.
If you asked me to draw my childhood home today, I’d draw a coffin. Maybe a mausoleum, although there’s something homey about those (thanks, Buffy). And for me, home was not homey, not cozy, not safe and welcoming. The two homes of my youth are bleak and airless in my memory, shallow graves where I felt simultaneously alone and smothered.
When my husband asks me how I feel about buying the house we’re currently renting, I can’t speak around the ghosts in my throat. I don’t know what it is to make a home. Everywhere I’ve lived, I’ve come to feel trapped in, repulsed by myself — my impulsive purchases and my tendency to hoard in hopes of embodying some quilted image of Prepared Adult, my enraged aversion to cleaning, the disconnect between my vision and execution.
My husband sees a home in this house. It's not just this house, either. Even in empty plots of land, he imagines a future of building and tinkering. It's like he's gazing into the crystal ball and seeing our future, while all I can do is stare at my own reflection, shrunken and upside down, stuck in glass I can't break.
Home to me is a safe place where my parents surrounded us with fun things and family and holiday dinners. I had 4 homes that I have memories of before buying my own home.
I can say that the 3rd home, the one I spent most of my childhood and teen years in was my favorite. Was it because of those memories, the innocent years? Was it because I liked the style of the house? Was it because I had friends in the neighborhood? Was it because I had the big bedroom all to my self?
I can also say the last house, was my least favorite, the big house. The one my father was so proud of. Why didnt I like this house? Was it because my teen years were uprooted to move to another town? Was it because I didn't have friends in the neighborhood now? Was it because I didnt like the style of the house?
Afterall my family was still there, we were still still surrounded by fun things, we still had holiday dinners with family. I still had my own bedroom.
But I must admit the first house that I bought with my late husband was my favorite. My favorite style, a house with a lot if charm and character. Mine to do exactly what I wanted to. My holiday dinners with family. It was the house I made a home.
When people ask me where I'm from, I don't have an answer. I never really felt at home anywhere. I lived in several places, about 12, not counting temporary residences. As a newborn, we lived with my grandparents. Four years later we moved into our own house one street over. When I was 6, my grandparents moved away, which was the end of the world for me. I spent every weekend and holidays with my grandparents. But I had to leave this homely place again and again. My parents always had to drag me into the car. After that, I moved 3 more times until I went to university.
When I studied in Heidelberg, I felt very comfortable in my student flat, but it only was a temporary home. When I finished my studies, I wanted to stay in Heidelberg, but I had existential fears without a plan. I left Heidelberg. At that point I developed life-threatening food allergies.
After graduating, I moved 6 more times. Among them was my life partner, with whom I'm together for 14 years now. I never wanted to buy a house, because I didn't know where, there was never that one place. Until a certain moment in my life.