There’s no place like home
But where is that, exactly?
That famous line Dorothy utters in The Wizard of Oz is something I’ve been thinking about lately. What does “home” actually mean?
I imagine it’s different for everyone, but for many it probably means the place we were born or raised, or maybe the place where our parents or family are. The Oxford Online Dictionary says that a home is the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household, but I don’t think that quite captures it. That definition describes perhaps the house one lives in (or the town or state), but to me home has a deeper meaning.
It’s sort of like the difference between “history” and “heritage.” The former is the objective events of the past, but the latter is the one most of us latch onto because we have emotional ties to it and a feeling of nostalgia about it. It’s our heritage and where we come from, so it’s important to us. In the same way, a house is a building, but a home is something else.
When I think of what home means to me, a few things and places come to mind. First and foremost, I have lived for my entire life in the city where I was born. My parents and siblings also live here or in the surrounding area. I met and married my husband here, where he too was born. I have friends here, and it feels comfortable in the way things that are familiar do. That sounds like a home, right? Sure, but for me it’s not the only one.
When I was in second grade, my parents moved us to the outskirts of the city looking for a more rural lifestyle. The new place became where I grew up so it should be home to me because all these many years later, my parents still live there. It is definitely our family home. But for some reason it has never resonated with me in the way my first house did, so much so that as a young adult I moved myself right back to my childhood neighborhood. I feel more connected to that place. I bought my first house only 12 blocks from the one in which I spent my first 7 years. And I still live in that house.
Why did that first neighborhood mean “home” so much to me even though my family and I have spent lots more time in the second one? What sorts of things were seared onto my brain and heart to leave such a deep impression? I’ve wondered about this a lot over the years.
But wait! There’s yet another place that I consider home — the Christmas tree farm my husband and I own. Granted we don’t live there because to date it has only been farm land, but we are currently working on putting a tiny house there so we can finally spend time there after all these years of my husband making the daily 60-mile commute. To be honest, it has been hard for me to envision farm land seeming like home versus it simply being my husband’s “office.” There’s not much there for me to do as a historian and academic, and so the place doesn’t define me or connect with me in the same way it does for him. But I think the tiny house is going to change some of that.
A complicating factor to all of this “home pondering” is that while it seems I clearly have a place most would recognize as home simply by virtue of having spent so much of my life in it, ironically, for as long as I can remember I have yearned to live somewhere else. It’s not that I don’t like where I am or am unhappy here, quite the contrary. It’s just that I’ve always felt if you’ve got just one life to live, why limit your sense of being at home to only one place?
Despite this yearning to live elsewhere, however, I have only briefly managed it on two occasions: a two-month internship at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. in the summer before grad school, and now during my annual forays to Iceland which started several years ago and on which I’m about to embark again.
I love Iceland and have considered it a second home of sorts for quite a while, though exactly why is something I’m not sure I can fully articulate for you. It’s a feeling, but I’ll give it a shot…
There is deep history there. Remember, I’m a historian who specializes in Vikings, and Iceland was founded by them, so that means a lot to me.
I have friends there.
I have people who have become my “family,” even though we have no blood ties whatsoever. When I’m back in the U.S. I miss them and they miss me.
The landscape makes me feel like I can breathe.
I feel at ease and safe there.
I’ve made good memories there.
I am happy there.
I guess these would be my answers to the question I posed at the beginning because all of these things are important to making me feel whole, and that’s something I think a home should do.
In the end, it finally came down to asking myself that strangest of questions that most of us probably rarely ask or want to think about:
What if I knew I only had one day to live, where would I want to spend it? Where would home be then?
The answer came pretty easily. With a certain farmer, on a certain tree farm, that is no more than a tiny speck on the planet but which is the entire universe to me and everything that means “home.” I’m looking forward to our tiny house adventure, but it won’t be home because it is on our land — it will be because he is there. And that’s all that matters to me.
So, back to where this all started with the Wizard of Oz….
If you’ve seen the movie, you’ll remember that Dorothy was desperately trying to get back home to Kansas — a place — only to find out that home isn’t a place; it’s an idea and feeling that exists in one’s mind and heart. It’s where we are free to be ourselves. Where we experience the full range of life’s ups and downs. It’s where we love and feel loved.
As for that tension between one home and many, yeah, I feel it. Listen to the song, and you’ll see what I mean.
I think we all rely too much one one place.
In the end if you take care, you can be happy or unhappy anywhere.
You make me think of Roger Waters' song "Home", especially its final line:
Everybody's got someone they call home