Tap Your Heels Three Times
Dorothy and Glinda in "The Wizard of Oz"
"There's no place like home .... "
Even repeating this phrase the requisite three times won't get me back "home." I'm between homes, you see.
And in the midst of not having a home, being literally homeless, I begin to question the meaning of the word. What *is* home? There is so much pithy good stuff out there to give me guidance: home is where the heart is. Home can be on the range. And Thomas Wolfe tells us "one can never go home again."
How do we know to go home at night? What calls us there? As often as not it's just habit. We don't conceptually think of why we go where we go, or why it feels like home. It's just ... where we go. And once we get there, what makes it home, anyway?
I spent most of my life thinking it was My Things. I still think in large measure that's my key. Not everyone is wired like this, though. I have friends who have no desire to own a home, who love traveling more than anything, and they feel smothered if they live too long in one place. I, however, dreamed of owning my first home when I wasn't even old enough to do so. And when I come back from a trip, when I "come home," there is a real joy in my own bed, my things where I left them, knowing the number of steps from my bedside to the bathroom, the sounds the pipes make when they tick in the night. The smell of my soap. The routine of coffee, of the way the sun slants through a window or the rain sounds against a pane.
And there's the real root: the familiar. The safe. My home is where I feel safe. Either protected, overtly, by solid doors and a sturdy roof, or safe in the known, the strengths as well as the weaknesses.
Living perpetually out of boxes or luggage, for me, is not safe. There's a pervasive sense of vulnerability, in having no routine of my own, no room of my own, bed of my own, mug of my own. I wonder, rationally, if it's unhealthy to manifest so much of my own sense of stability in what are truly just things. But they are not just things to me. My ritual treatment of them, my need of them, invests them with the same kind of sustenance of any other ritual, be it habitual holiday trip or even the comfort of spiritual belief. These things create order, create the known. Create me.
There's also the school of thought that one can "feel at home" with other people, be they like-minded, or kindred spirits. Or friends known a lifetime. I live in a city that's been my residence for just six years, though. I know a few people, some of them are good friends, but not like that. There hasn't been enough time to create that sense of belonging, of simpatico. Over time, flickers of connection would grow. But not as deeply as that yet. So the city feels strange, and my friends feel far away, and there is no sense of "home" with the people in my life. We all feel like strangers here, and to each other. And of course none of them are neighbors or close by; every aspect of my life feels far flung. It's as if a microcosmic version of the Big Bang is playing out in the clustered galaxy that is my own life: everything spreads farther apart, and faster.
On my commute away from work, toward the house I've been camped out in while it waits to rent again, I realized I don't know why I go there. Little, if anything of mine, is there. The mattress on the floor: borrowed. My few books are in boxes. The walls are bare; all but one of the rooms are completely empty. The only way I know I "belong" there is the smallest of facts: I have a key that fits the lock in the front door. That is the only reason I know I'm supposed to be there.
If in fact I am supposed to be anywhere.