Home.
We use the word several times a day: “I’m heading home now!” “Sorry, he’s not home.” “Can I take that home with me?” Home is where you hang your hat, where your heart is and where, at least in baseball, you’re always safe. But how often do we think–really think–about what it means?
I’ve lately spent a lot of time mulling that over, ever since I got the news that my parents are selling their house of 35 years and moving into a lovely new condo. And while I fully recognize that in the grand scheme of life events, witnessing your parents move out of your childhood home ranks quite low on the Global Depressing and Traumatic Scale, this has not kept me from slipping into a low-grade depression and feeling slightly traumatized. At first I thought I was just getting a cold, and then one day I happened upon a photograph of my brother and me, standing outside our front door on the first day of school, scrubbed faces shining at the camera, and I started sniffling. Then the Halloween pictures turned up–imagine a 5- and 3-year-old decked out in homemade bumblebee and tiny clown costumes, surrounded by piles of flame-colored fall leaves–and I was done for.
Admittedly, I am sentimental–I weep openly at weddings, even those of people I’ve met exactly once–a characteristic that makes me an alien species in my family, which views public displays of emotion with the same kind of distaste and vague horror most people reserve for worm-eating contests or hairless cats.
Nevertheless, I am committed to standing by my psychological upset. To me, anyway, this transition is a Big Deal. Unlike most of my friends, and the vast majority of my age mates, whose parents either downsized long ago or who were uprooted repeatedly as kids, I’ve eaten Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners at the same table, in the same dining room, looking at the same artwork my whole life. I’ve returned to sleep in the same room, even as it metamorphosed over the years from a teenager’s cluttered sanctuary to the inevitable guest room. This constancy of place makes me extraordinarily lucky, I think, but it has also left me unprepared for the impact of saying goodbye to the one constant physical space in my life: somewhere that looks, smells and just feels like home.
I can’t (and wouldn’t dare) speak for the rest of my family, but for me this move is more than trucks arriving to take my parents’ carefully edited furniture collection to its pristine new nest. It means I actually have to respond to my dad’s constant, hopeful refrain of, “So maybe you’d like to take some of your stuff with you back to Chicago?” It means someone else will be sleeping in my childhood bedroom, staring out the window at the streetlight’s yellow glow reflected on the branches of our maple tree. It means I will never climb down the creaking basement steps at night, telling myself under my breath that no monsters live down there, despite all audible evidence to the contrary. It means, in short, that I will finally be responsible, at last, for making my own home–creating a living space that captures parts of who I am, rather than reflecting someone else’s style.
Achieving that, of course, is a lifelong process: As our environments and influences change, so do our ideas about ourselves, and, in turn, the way we see ourselves living.
In my 20s, for example, I harbored some ideas about window treatments that, in retrospect, make me extremely uncomfortable. But while my thirtysomething self couldn’t live with reams of raw linen nailed haphazardly above a peeling window frame, they were exactly right within their context–a tiny, cheaply renovated apartment on the edge of New York’s Chinatown. Or at least that’s what I told myself. The point is, those terrible curtains were mine, and because I’d chosen them and tacked them to the wall, they made that cramped, smelly walk-up feel a little bit more like home.
There are a lot of theories about when childhood truly ends. Some say it’s the day you get married or buy a house. Others believe they only truly grew up when they became parents themselves. For some, a parent’s death or illness flags the frontier of adulthood.
I’d posit that perhaps another marker exists: The moment when you walk down your parents’ front steps for the last time, shedding what remains of your younger self, steeling yourself not to look back over your shoulder. Because you know that only ghosts remain. And you know that home is only as far away as the people–and the window treatments–you love.
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jreaves@tribune.com
