I just returned from nearly a week of visiting my roots ---- people and places ---- which always brings up questions with no answers. When I go back to Iowa, I have a strong sense of going home, even though I've lived right here in the triangle of North Carolina much longer than I ever lived in the tall corn state.
I don't have a hometown. Raleigh will never be my hometown, even if I spend the rest of my life here. It just doesn't work that way. My cousin Jennie and I were walking the streets of my mother's hometown, Albia, last week. Albia is Jennie's hometown as well. She was born and raised there, graduated from high school there. It's the place she comes from. I told her that if I HAD to choose a hometown, Albia would probably be it, even though I was never an actual resident. It's the place I've always gone back to, the place that held my family.
So what makes home? Jill told me that while I was gone our house was not a home. I know what she means. Today, as I puttered around watering plants, playing with Buddy, sorting through mail and paying bills, I knew that I was fitting myself back in, making myself at home in my home.
It's a loaded word.... HOME.
"Hi Honey, I'm home!" "I'll be home for Christmas." "You can never go home again." "Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in."
When I travel with my daughter, the first thing she does in a hotel room is empty her suitcase and put everything in drawers and closet, array the toothbrush, shampoo, etc. on the bathroom counter. She makes it like home, however temporary. I appreciate that effort.
I think the voices make me feel more at home than anything else, when I return to the family. None of my aunts and uncles still live in the houses I remember from childhood, but when I hear Aunt Harriet's voice, or Aunt Margaret's laugh, I know I've reached a place of safety and comfort. I've known these people as long as I've been alive. It doesn't matter a bit that all of us have changed in appearance as we age; I still see and hear the folks I've always known, whether they're my 60-something cousins or my 80-something aunts and uncles. And I also hear echoes of the grandparents and great-grandparents I listened to when I was young.
And by the way, I get to see myself reflected in gestures, syntax, features, outlook on life. Wanna know where my perseverance comes from? My Uncle Alan is going to Colorado to climb a mountain this summer ---- again. But he's a youngin' --- he's only 84. How about my penchant for the large gesture? It's only a week or so until my Uncle George turns 88 and he'll celebrate by jumping out of an airplane ----- for the first time in his life. Another check-off on the bucket list, and way more courage than I would ever have.
I come from excellent stock, I believe. I love to be around these down-to-earth role models, the grown-ups who take me exactly as I am and celebrate each other, as well as all of us "kids", even in our messy human-ness. I may not have a place to be from, but I have a family who sources me, no matter where I land. And that's enough hometown for me.
