Now That I'm Not Trying to Write About Home

I‘m sitting at my dining room table, which has somehow morphed into an office (we eat here only on special occasions), spending more time looking out the big glass doors to the deck than I am writing. The skies are overcast, and the wind is spinning the CDs our neighbor strung up to keep deer out of his garden. I’ve given up writing a blog on “home” because another Sunday has brought another subject, and I still can’t decide what “home” means to me.

I actually started thinking about this shortly after my husband and I retired and he brought up the possibility of moving “home,” meaning the area where we were reared. (We grew up not 10 miles from one another.) I told him I’d miss him.

The house where he grew up no longer stands, yet he feels some kind of deep connection to the land. I do not. Many times I’ve driven past the house where I spent most of my childhood (photo left) and asked myself what I’d do if it was put on the market now that I’m no longer required to leave my house to work. I don’t think I’d feel the need to act.

I can’t help but wonder if the vagabond nature of my very early life caused me to grow such shallow roots. I spent more time on trains than on terra firma the first couple of years, then lived in rented houses until after I started kindergarten. My husband was brought home after he was born to the same house where he and I were married twenty years later.

What does he feel that I lack? I think the concept of “home” must be of a magical place where you feel you belong and are at peace. The house I live in now (photo left) is the fourteenth place my husband and I have lived since we married. It’s a humble but comfortable house with a good vibe, and I like to come back to it after I’ve been away. But it lacks that magic, that peace. I’ve felt that only one place in my life—at the old resort in the Missouri Ozarks where my family sometimes spent long weekends.

And that, my friends, is a blog for another day.