On The Meaning of Home…

Last week I read a wonderful article by Pat Conroy on the meaning of home. He lusciously described Beaufort, South Carolina, the first town he felt had at home in during his youthful wanderings dictated by his father’s army orders.

The author of PRINCE OF TIDES is a word master, and I found myself intellectually squirming with pleasure by the lush word choices he used describing Beaufort.

I grew up in Minneapolis in a lovely brick and clapboard house in a perfectly lovely area of a lovely city – at least the five warm months of the year -- a city with theaters and museums and symphonies and all the things that make a civilized place civilized. In looking back, I have warm memories of hot, humid summer days with sunlight lingering deep into the evening, with a world around me that felt comfortable and rather safe. If one discounts ones own personal psychological travails, it seemed a world in which bad things didn’t happen.

But it was not a place where I felt at home. I was one of those children who somehow knew they didn’t fit where they were but didn’t know where to think about fitting. It didn’t occur to me that there might be someplace that would feel like “home”. I kept trying to make Minneapolis feel like home until the day I ran away, encouraged by the psychiatrist I was seeing who felt very strongly I would be better off somewhere else.

Living in Los Angeles, I took a job that caused me to travel incessantly and when I wasn’t traveling for work, I was traveling for pleasure. One friend commented I was the only person he knew that called to say good-bye instead of hello, because I was always leaving.

It has only been now, in the last three years, poised as I am on the descending part of my life, that I have found myself feeling “at home” where I am, physically. Sometime in my Minneapolis daydreaming, I dreamt the life I have now; anchored by the little house on the Claverack Creek where I can stand on any day and watch the geese nurture their goslings.

I am surrounded there by the “stuff” that matters that I have collected and have brought from my mother’s house after her death. I can sit on the coach where I lay as a child reading and dreaming. I am surrounded by the books I love and am resting in the soft and generous comfort of a relationship that has worked for nine years, in a place that does not look askance or judge us by the nature of our relationship.

The summers evoke those hot and humid Minnesota days and the winters echo the snow and cold but without being as overbearing as either Minnesota season.

It is a time and place where I feel “at home”. It is a time and place where I feel comfortable, at home in the country while maintaining a place in the city. It is magical to sit by the fire on a winter night with a good book and a midsummer night’s dream to sit on the deck, sipping cold drinks and visiting with good friends who have come over for a barbeque.

It is, for me, at last, what I never felt I had, a sense of home, of being “at home”, of having a place that allows me to rest – and to breathe. It is the sweet smell of land that belongs to us and that there is an “us” for land to belong to. It is a place to share and to be joyful in sharing; it is a sense of happy memories being made that echo in the walls when events are over. It is a place to look forward to returning with the light sense of joy at returning. It is having, at last, all the things I really wanted.