Where is Your Home?

Since both of my parents have passed away, Chicago no longer feels like home to me. I still have two brothers there but it's just not home any longer without my parents there. That made such a huge difference. I moved to georgia 10 years ago and as much as I love living here this isn't home either. Not like that. It doesn't feel like I have that kind of "home" anymore but it's okay. I buried the notion along with my parents, I guess.

My grandmother and grandfather met while both worked in emergency clinics set up to deal with the 1919 influenza epidemic. When they decided to marry, neither wanted to live with their families, but they had little money. So they finally found a four-room "bungalo." My grandfather and his soon-to-be brother-in-law jacked the house up, and then dug a cellar beneath it; they put a solid masonry foundation underneath; they added a second storey with two bedrooms; they put in hardwood floors, and built a staircase with a bannister; they added a gallery (a front porch), which they later enclosed, with sash windows the length of the house; they built a side porch to also function as a lumber room. They turned that little "bungalo" into a four bedroom house. I grew up in that house, and it was solid and it was beautiful.

My grandmother sold it in 1969. Two years later, i passed through that town, visiting old friends while on leave from the Army. I saw the old house. It looked very shabby. The vines in the two grape arbors were dying (probably from lack of care), the hedges were untrimmed and overgrown, and broken down in places, the picket fence was sagging in the middle and hadn't been painted in years, and there was a junk car up on blocks in the back yard. I've never looked back, because it makes me too angry.

Another thing that may make a difference is the fact that we lived in various apartments while I was growing up. Never a house. There is no "family" home to speak of.

Well, when going to my mother's house (that's where I lived until I finish school), and I'm driving ther at least once per day, I'm always driving to "Geseke", which is the town's name. I did so, since I had my first own apartment.

My wife, however, always goes 'home', when we drive to her mother's - she moved 15 times, I just about 8, 9 times.

Home when I was in Viet Nam was refered to as "The World" as in, "I'm going back to the World" in 93 days." or, as when I was to go on R&R I might have said "I'm going to Australia for R&R, it's not 'The World', but it's close."

My current home is my home, it is out in the country-not in the city- maybe that explains it.

Very interesting folks - I will comment after work....

I feel flattered that you think about our commends whilst working, dlowan.
But be aware of job safety!

my home is in my head....I call it Legion Estates.....

Very funny! Watch abysses and herds of pigs!

Walter - my poor brain never stops - it is a curse...

Now I'm so confused, we are talking about home, then it becomes dlowan's brain is a deep, deep abyss -

I better go home, it is too, too much!

paukukalo, maui.

the greatest place (my opinion of course) in all of hawaiian islands.

So, Deb, let me be the first to invite you to come and visit Cape Cod. It's just another glacier dump... but we call it home.

Was thinking on this. I've been out of college for a bit over twenty years. I've lived in ten or eleven places. Except for a year and a half when I was going through some changes, sparated from my first wife, and had a decent job for once, I lived in Vermont... otherwise I've been in Massachusetts the whole time.

Home.

An interesting question.

I considered my parents' home my 'home", and called it such until about eight years ago, when my daddy died. (I was thirty-three, with children.) I noticed I quit saying I was going 'home' for a visit. My mother acquired strange yapping dogs and a psychotic cat, and the feel of the structure was no longer familiar to me. She sold the 'family home' two years ago.

This house we're renting doesn't feel like home. I guess I am currently 'homeless'. This does bother me. We've moved around a lot, and I don't think my children have a sense of 'home'.

We moved a lot when I was a child, and sometimes our family was happy in those places, sometimes not. I was most safe and happy from age 9-12 when we lived in a nice rental house in Evanston, Illinois, and I liked the school and had friends to play with. Things only went down hill when we moved back to california, even though we bought a house, as my father was often unemployed and both my parents' health failed.

My own second apartment, in Westwood, California, was a pleasure, and I stayed there about six years. That was home, I had a lot of control over it, was happy there.

My husband and I bought a house in a sort of tough area where banks usually declined to lend, and fixed it up. That area is now one of the higher priced real estate markets there are. But I had to sell after our divorce, and that was a real wrench, or double wrench. That house was very much home. We both put a lot of ourselves into it, and it was happy place for a long time. Since then there have been two more owners and it has been remodeled extensively twice. I feel terrible about it, my poor baby house.

I've moved three times after that, when I first left LA, and that was rather trying on the old soul. I am now in a new old house, and am struck with massive inertia on fixing it, and it needs fixing. Still, it has grown into home.

I am an easy at naming a place home though...when I go on vacation, if I stay in the same hotel a few days, by the third day as I head back to it I tend to think "I'm going home now." Especially if it is a new and perhaps foreign city...it is my way of making the city sort of mine, zoning in on a place.

I was just wondering this myself lately.

My childhood home was knocked down when I was 15, I went to college out of state at 18 and have been here ever since. The apartment I'm in now Ive lived in about 13 years. Just the same amount of time as that childhood home I spent most of my years in.
However, when I think of 'home' Im torn.
At times home is back where I grew up. Other times, its right here. I've been wondering how long it takes to think of here as home and where I grew up simply as a hometown.
My parents arent back there, and only a few family members are still in the area. Its strange that I still associate home with a place I lived so long ago, and that I dont go back to, like a family homestead.
Visiting back where I grew up is so different now that although I feel that hometown feeling when approaching and through certain areas, so many others have me feeling that its not the same place. Where I am now doesnt have that same home feeling but, it is home.
Perplexing for sure.

Two thoughts:

For years, on all the phones I had, there was a speed dial address for 'Home' .... It was my parent's house on Newman Street and when they moved they took the number with them and it was still 'home' even though I had never lived in the new house and was thousands of miles away.

It was just a number on a speed dial with a short name. At least, it was until Pop died suddenly and Mom had to move to one of those brick places with names containing Shady or Acres or Estates or Glen and the number was gone as suddenly as Pop. Mom and Pop had had our home number since before World War II and now it wasn't ours anymore.

There are parts of grief one does not expect. The parts one does expect comprise about two per cent, the rest of grief comes out of nowhere, comes out of the forgotten familiar things, comes out of things lost and suddenly found and lost again.

Here is a glimpse of our home, long ago, far away, just this minute gone.

For Eileen T. Jeffries
1917-2003


Lights at Other Houses

I have a set of pictures, Mom,
A movie in my mind
Saturday night on Newman Street,
An ordinary place in ordinary time.

"Oh turn the front porch light on,
Your sisters aren't yet here",
(Mike and Brian sound asleep,
Pop's in his easy chair.)

I see the lights at other houses, Mom,
all through the neighborhood,
Carpenters built those houses, Mom
Straight and true and good.

The lasagna pans are put away,
we have a cup of tea.
I eat the last of the lemon pie,
the piece you saved for me.
The Irish bread is baking,
Tippy scratches at the door.
I let her out, we have some talk
The latest rain, the Red Sox score.

You're ironing the shirts we'll wear,
next day at morning Mass,
I sing that song you can't remember
errrr Colonial Boy?, ummm Parting Glass?
There's a rattle at the back door,
Ann and MaryEllen home at last,
Tip taps out her greetings,
More tea, more talk, more laughs.

I go to turn the porch light off,
I start to write this poem

There are lights at other houses, Mom,
But our light's on a home.
Carpenters build houses, Mom,
But you have built a Home.
There are lights at other houses, Mom,
But our light's on a Home.

Jonathan Jeffries
January 2003

That's just beautiful...

Thanks, Joe.

Both my parents are dead, but, looking back, I don't think of any of the places we lived in as "home" now.

I had an odd childhood, and, as young as 4 or 5, used to run away regularly. I learned to get on the bus and go to my grandmother's place. This was the place I came home to when I was born, and lived there for the first few years. It was also the place where I hid from my mother's irrational behaviour, and my father's temper.

These days, I drive past the bottom of the street most days, on the way home from work, and occasionally drive up to see the lions on the front porch. I have a similar lion at my front door. The place still looks much the same. The area was poor then, but has now become very trendy, very coffee-set. Very close to the city.

It's not my home - that's where I live now, but it's the only other place I have fond memories of.

Some of these entries are very beautiful (e.g. Joe Nation), thank you dlowan for the question and others for the answers. I write this not to pander to emotions, nor to complain. I am quite proud of who and where I am, and what I call or visualize as home.

The more I read the entries, the less clear it is for me what "home" means. I am not sure if I have a home. This is mainly due to life circumstances of varying intensity.

I'd have to go back to age 4 to tap into some feeling of a place to which I belonged and in which I felt safe. I only remember snippits of the place, my sun-filled blue room, the cool bathroom tiles, the expansive terrace overlooking other flats, the smell of the kerosene-vendors filling the burners in the living room...

This ended when half of the home left with mom. from then on, it was a year at a time in different apartments with me and dad. The most homey place was inside his white car (Rambler) for the following years because when I was there, I knew he'd be there too.

Then stepmom came to share dad with, and a half sister to share a room with. The crowded Rambler was soon sold, and a year later Dad was gone too (with a car accident), while I was away from home. I never returned.

A revolution swept my country, civil unrest broke out, houses (including my new home with a resurgent mother) were invaded, the country was invaded, and bombs and rockets started destroying lives. There was no concept of home other than the security of family member's voices in the dark, and the defiance of surviving an external enemy, and an internal tyrranical rule.

I was fortunate (ironically) to leave my home country behind, and with it all the feeling of belonging to a place, or the security of a sanctuary. In a way, this homelessness was liberating, as I started another life in another country (US), where I was lucky not to be singled out for my looks or my language skills. Home really was where the heart was, which was wherever I was; skiing down a mountain, talking all night long in student lounges, camping under the stars with a girlfriend...Home was everywhere.

But, not really. All that was a spiritual fillibuster , and I ran out of things to distract myself with as I graduated and started work. Since then, I have travelled and lived in different countries, found refuge in many friends' home and hearts, the rocks atop a small island, or the warmth of an Irish pub.

Ultimately though, Home escapes me, like the memories of the sunny blue room and the smell of lavender soap in the bathtub of my childhood days.