Home

A few months after we moved to Boston we flew to San Diego to spend the holidays with family. We had been flying in and out of San Diego where my sister and her family live for over 20 years and that airport felt as familiar as an old friend. When we flew back into Logan Airport it was with a strange, uneasy feeling to think we were coming “home”. Much as we loved living here it hadn’t yet earned that title.

Now three years later, I boarded a plane bound for Boston and my heart sang, “home” with all the relief and longing that word holds, even as I knew that I would miss the love and connection with all the family and friends I had just visited.

Such is the world today. I am sure there are many who still live in the towns in which they grew up, surrounded by faces they have known since birth, but most people I know live far away from their families. It is the cost of having an adventurous spirit, the drawback to having what my family calls “itchy feet”. My mother left her hometown of St. Louis for the heady world of Los Angeles in the early 50’s, my parents moved our family to Portugal in the early 70’s and we have all been on the move ever since. California, Oregon, New Jersey, France, England, Scotland, Australia, and Alaska are only a few of the places members of my family have called home.

So what does home really mean? I just spent two and a half weeks in 6 different cities soaking up “home” in all its beautiful forms. Long conversations with my mom on the couch; morning natters with my sister, her at one end of the bed and me at the other; poolside chats with my brother-in-law. Working side by side with my brother in his carpentry shop and my sister-in-law in her classroom. Stolen moments catching up with my cousin long into the night when we really should have been sleeping. Car conversations with good friends on long drives, because at a certain undefined point friends become family too. Holding warm cups of tea, curled up on couches, perched on kitchen stools, cutting up vegetables, cooking, washing dishes together. Lubricated conversations over delicious meals; sleepy words in the early morning, shared worries, offered hopes, the slightly ripped feeling in your heart when you have to say goodbye. These are the people who populate me even when we are far apart.

Yet when I look at what home has meant these past few weeks, it has not only been the people but the places themselves that have spoken to me. The soothing, healing crash of the ocean; the deep warmth of the California sun after the fog has burned off; the sideways rain and the green, green, every shade of green in Oregon. The familiar wood cabins on Cascade Head filled with writers and inspiration. My garden. Oh my garden, the moist earth soft beneath my feet, scattered with fallen golden leaves already. Every plant and tree I had lovingly placed greeting me like an awkward teenager, taller, leggier and leafier that when I had left 3 years ago, apples weighing down the branches of the sapling I once knew, the air thick with woodland magic and the sweet scent of herbs. How had I ever left this place?

How can there be so many homes? By the end of my travels I longed for my husband, my children, my bed, my solitude: for home, even as it hurt to say goodbye. No one place is everything, but each fills up the little places inside us that together make us who we are. I kept an ongoing list along the way, every book recommendation, every promise I made, every idea to pursue and revelation to ponder. When I wake next week in my quiet house I will follow up. I will integrate my places, my people, my thoughts, and I will feel at home once more.