I’M THE ONE LOOKING AWAY

Since Ed and I are considering a move to a senior living community, I’ve been reflecting on the meaning of “home,” a word that’s always been complicated for me.

Home has sometimes been described as a place where we live semi-permanently, where we feel properly oriented in space and time, and where we’re relatively predictable and secure. Matthew Desmond in Evicted writes, “Home is the center of life.” It’s where we are ourselves. Everywhere else, we’re someone else.

I feel like I was “someone else” for most of the first 4 decades of life. My first home was a leprosy station in Paraguay, where I felt superfluous and on the fringes. Then, from the age of 10 to 19, I was shuffled from one place to another to go to school in the capital city of Asunción. During those years, I would have found it challenging to answer the question, “Where is home?” and I always felt like “someone else,” looking into somebody else’s home from the outside.

At 20, I created my own home with my children’s father, and for the next 10 years, I felt the security and safety of that space. Until it imploded and I again roamed from place to place, never quite knowing who I was or where I belonged.

At 40, Ed and I came together. And although we have moved to 7 different locations in 3 states over the course of the past 32 years, and are again considering another move, the spaces we inhabited have all felt like home.

So you see, “home is where one starts from” (T.S. Eliot) has never made any sense at all to me. Rather, for me home is where I’m finally, irrevocably ending up. As James Baldwin said in Giovanni’s Room, “Perhaps home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition.”

It doesn’t matter where we happen to live. As long as Ed and I are together, home is truly our irrevocable condition.

Is reflecting on “home” uncomplicated for you?

We are together on this journey!