HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS

[Changes in our lives during a time of pandemic have nudged me to think about home. Many people who formerly left home to go to work no longer have to do so. Those of us who are retired spend, I suspect, a large amount of time in the place where we live. So--what makes a home? Where is home? Here are my thoughts from a few years back.]

"Home is where the heart is."

Know who said that?

Pliny the Elder, Roman author, naturalist, and natural philosopher. Born 1st Century AD.

I don't know the occasion of his pronouncement, but it's become a cliché in our time. Like most clichés, it's true.

Consider the following:

• In my first 20 years on Earth, I moved from one abode to another 17 times.
• During those moves, I lived in houses, apartments, and one time a remodeled gas station.
• Our moves took us from small town to country, to larger town, to city, to country again, and back to small town.
• I lived in five different states of the Union, all of them in the Midwest

For a number of years, during these moves, my home was where my mother was. When I was 15, my mother died--so that anchor was gone from my life.

After that my sense of home--not as a place but as an attachment--underwent several incarnations. I married, had children, and began making a home for them. (In those days, wives/moms were able to stay home and be with the children, being homemakers in the literal sense of the word.) Like many new parents, I tried to give my children what I didn't have as a kid--a house they could call home, freedom to explore, and permission to keep every blessed thing they wanted to. It helped that the first house we bought was a four-bedroom, two-story square frame house, with large rooms, a basement, and an airing porch on the back. Plus a big yard, fenced in, and room for a dog and a cat (or two--they don't seem to come in singles for this family), plus a neighborhood full of friends to play with, go to school with, and get in trouble with.

When the children were in school and I had free time during the day, I went back to college to finish my degree. I made friends there who have lasted through the years into retirement. They've become part of my family--and though we aren't close geographically, we are close in the best way of all--we're at home with each other whenever we meet.

I love grocery shopping when I'm home. That's what makes me feel totally normal. I love both the idea of home as in being with my family and friends, and also the idea of exploration. I think those two are probably my great interests.
Yo-Yo Ma

I can't show you pictures of my homes--there were too many down through the years. The one I live in now is a three-bedroom ranch, like the houses my father built most of his life. My town's population is around 12,000, and it's the county seat.

For a number of years my oldest daughter and I went back to our hometown to visit my aunt and several first cousins. One year we attended a family reunion, on the 100th anniversary of my maternal grandparents' wedding. After a life of nearly perpetual moving around, I felt quite grounded in the park that day--I was related to all these people, and so was my daughter. We belonged.

Where we love is home - home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.

The most important thing is this: I've been in this house, in my small city, over 30 years. I've found a physical place to call home. But if I had to leave, I could. Home is a concept--and I carry its picture in my heart.