- For the past couple of months I have occasionally had this intense yearning to go home, but I honestly do not know where home is. I grew up in Orem, Utah, and spent my early teens in the Salt Lake valley. I still feel a strong sense of belonging every time I see the Wasatch mountains, yet I really have no desire to settle down in what's known by locals (with about equal measures of affection and sarcasm) as "Happy Valley." It's the place of my birth, but it isn't home. Not anymore.
Nor is my parents' house in Idaho, where they've lived since I was 16. I love to visit. I enjoy my family's long conversations about all sorts of things, cooking with my mom, watching movies with my brother, and helping out around the house. It is and always will be a place of love, welcome, and safety. But there was a subtle shift that happened at some point, a few years ago, when I stopped mentally referring to it as "home" and started thinking of it as "Mom and Dad's place." Sleeping in my old room feels strange--like well-worn clothes that no longer fit right.
In the first five years after moving out of my parents' house, I moved seven times (that's student life for you). I've had good roommates, and I've lived alone. I've lived in a couple of houses and a few apartments; in Rexburg, Idaho; Pullman, Washington; Rexburg again; then St. George, Utah; and finally Mesa, Arizona, where I've stayed put, thankfully, for nearly two solid years now in a nice house with roommates who are also friends, great rent, a garden and chickens, and room enough for all my books. I have no plans to move again until life moves me. Yet none of these places have felt like home--just a good place to live for a while.
I feel unrooted. Home is a place that doesn't exist yet. What if I never get there?
"Home", a Piano Guys cover filmed near Zion National Park in Utah
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I feel the same way. I thought I was rooted in Iowa until I moved to Rexburg and then neither place felt like home. I moved to Oregon and it doesn't feel like home either. The only place that I felt like I was going home to was Hawaii. It screams my name and begs me to move back but Ralph doesn't call it home. It is hard to find home...
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting that you focus on a geographical location as "home", Jenn, as opposed to a residence. For me, I think it's a bit of both. It's also (maybe primarily) people. When I first got to Arizona, I thought "thank goodness I only have to stay here for 5 years!" (The fact that it was late July probably didn't help.) But then I got to know and love a lot of people here, and the long springtimes, and the orange blossoms--oh, the orange blossoms! Now I think I could call Arizona home, someday, if I had a reason to stay after I earn my PhD.
DeleteBut the life of a young academic is typically nomadic--you go where the tenure track jobs are, assuming you're lucky enough to get one--so unless I found something or someone to anchor me here, there's a good chance that in a few years I'll end up somewhere else. That uncertainty, that sense of impermanence, is likely a large part of what keeps me feeling unrooted.
I am very curious to know the mental process or association that makes a place "home." People move a lot, and the urge to "nest" is common enough for a cliche.
ReplyDeleteNice post, Rebecca. I think most of us can relate to this need to feel at home, even when we've lived in the same place for a long time (as I have). I really like the way Abigail Thomas puts it in her memoir A Three Dog Life:
ReplyDeleteTwenty years ago I asked a friend if he felt (as I did) a
kind of chronic longing, a longing I wanted to identify.
"Of course," he answered. "What is it?" I asked. "What is
it we are longing for?" He thought a minute and said, "There
isn't any it. There is just the longing for it." This
sounded exactly right. Years later and a little wiser, I
know what the longing was for: here is where I belong...but
we're all looking for the place we belong. And what is home,
anyway, but what we cobble together out of our changing
selves? Maybe there isn't any it, as my friend said, only
the longing.
That's beautiful, Allison. Thanks for sharing!
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