A week, A month
A year
10…20 years
A moment, blinking against the wind.
Sand between the toes
Water breaking on rocks
On sand, a bright eclipse
A symphony, deafening
Drowning out all else
Swallowing the years in
A wave of nostalgia
Of water
And sand
Of rocks, older than memory
And time as
Fluid as the sea

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Some places really never do stop feeling like home.

The way that sentence is written bothers me both grammatically and sentimentally, but I still mean it. It’s a dissonance I bracingly enjoy and that dissonance nearly animates the sense of Home for me. I’ve written about this before – about my understanding of home vs. my expectations of home vs. my knowing I am home. And here I am again.

Perhaps it’s the way of my life – a searching for, wanting of, calling to – home, and it’s fluid definition which I cannot fully communicate, but here I’ll try again:

Home – A place my heart is?
Home – a place rooted to a life?
Home – a place.

• A place to which my entire self sees to connect
  sub, un, and fully, conscious
• soul deep – a visceral reaction
• unexpected – flooded with memory fully of expected promise which doesn’t always seem logically tangible – manifested in a feeling of being suffocated by love and loss and an inability to communicate how those have shaped who I am – how the words I am don’t even actually convey the interconnected strands that are woven into my core.
• A hidden place
• A hiding place

None and all of that work – my definition is lacking and full.

As I read two very different books recently, both attempted an understanding of home – or perhaps a justification of it in some way – a connection for the reader, for the characters.

In Heretics, Chesterton writes something to the effect of a place feeling like home until a person chooses to put down roots, and then it becomes just another place – that home is illusive.

and then, in All the Pretty Horses, McCarthy’s main character comes across some wise men as he returns to his place of origin – having ridden far across countries to find his place, and found resistance everywhere he might choose, his good friend invites him to stay and he refuses. Our friend asks: “Where is your country”, to which the response: ” I don’t know where it is. I don’t know what happens to country.”. And there it is. Home, country – stationary and a constantly moving target. That illusive place that Chesterton claims, is echoed here – and also in my own experience.

Besides being hard to pin down, the other thing that is clear in both of these descriptions of home/country is the feeling of connection that man and country experience – that they are linked in some inexplicable way – a feeling which makes moving away from that country and thriving both difficult and likely futile – as one seems to depend upon the other in a way invisible. The tension of longing a constant background to the entire story.

My own experience reflects a little of both of these literary Truths. The majority of my life has now been lived within the town I currently reside – it’s what should be described as home. Try though I may (or may not over the years), these 20 years have not inspired the feeling or sense of home that I immediately , emotionally, physically, feel when I drive into my mountains, or up to my beach. I don’t know the development involved in connecting a person to a place – I don’t know if it’s genetically woven or developmental between the ages of 3 and 18 somewhere. Whatever it may be, 20 years later, I’m baffled by the need to laugh and cry, and sing and run, and LIVE that occurs the very moment I cross the city lines. It’s a roll down the car window, breathe dep and sink into the foundations of self. A grateful, calming, intense, desire to stake a claim and live my best life right there.

A further up, further in, feeling that makes me look around and expect the redeeming of all things.

A longing to never leave, and a knowing that I can’t stay.

So. What I wonder is:

Is it just me? What or where is your sense of home? Has it evolved since you were young? Did you choose it? DO you have different words for this feeling?