My friend, Gillett, reminded me recently of a view that gives both of a feeling of home: for me, driving up from the Reno airport, it’s the moment on Mt. Rose Highway when Lake Tahoe comes into sight. The first time I saw it it took my breath away and every time since seeing that lake has felt like a homecoming.
I feel a similar feeling when I’m in Colorado, heading deeper into the mountains, making the drive from Denver up I70 toward Glenwood Springs. Every single time I have that uncanny feeling that I have been there, was there, in a different life. Perhaps am there right now, in a different life. Many tell us that we don’t experience linear reincarnation, but rather we are in simultaneous lives right now. Time, as a human construct, is irrelevant in matters of the soul.
I’m thinking a lot, as my third and final kid gets ready to fly the coop, of the idea of home.
I have also felt very strong adverse reactions to places. San Diego when I was young, stepped off a plane to begin my life as a teacher there and never once felt that I was in the right place. Couldn’t get away fast enough. A town I lived in not that long ago, in Vermont, always felt off, unwell, and when I lived there I was that, too. Ungrounded, unhealthy, lost.
I wonder how this works, what it means. Clearly there are places where our soul resonates with the land.
For a lot of my life I have left. Places, relationships, jobs. I am the One Who Leaves. Seeking what, I’m not sure. For a long time I wondered what was wrong with me, then finally I found a sense of ok-ness when someone said, It’s OK, we’re not trees, we don’t need roots.
Even though we like to talk of ourselves that way: being rooted, putting down roots, and always speak of it in positive terms, looking with a measure of disdain at those among us who can’t seem to do that. Or don’t want to do it.
The wanderers. Gypsies.
I did not know my grandparents, I had a very distant step aunt and step uncle and that was pretty much it in terms of extended family. One great aunt who died when I was in my twenties and too busy constructing my own life to ask her any questions about our past.
I have no stories, no place to go back to, no grounding features in my life. I am all water, flowing through life. I come by it honestly. Life set me up without borders or anchors.
Fifty-eight years into it, having been a lot of places and met a lot of people and seen a LOT of very, very cool things, I would not trade this life for a grounded existence in one place. You could not gift me a house in the town where I grew up; I would hand it directly to the first homeless people I saw. Life is both short and long and the world is filled with curiosities. My favorite word has always been freedom.
I’m trying to remember the last time I did a cross-country trek. Nate was fifteen, I think. He wanted to see Mt. Rushmore, so we drove to South Dakota and he flew home from Denver. Before that I took my younger brother on a similar trip. Before that several adventures in the summer when I was a teacher. I’ve been to every state but Hawaii, and I’m inclined to go there now to help with rebuilding. Until now I’ve had no interest, though I don’t really know why.
Tomorrow we whoosh off after church, Helen Cooper Hood Eyre and I. We have snacks, books, music, clothes. I know from experience it’s not the crap you have in the back of the car that matters, it’s the sense of adventure you go with. It’s your willingness to talk to strangers and find the interesting stuff along the way. We don’t have a lot of time—she’s got a job to get to, but we’ll make the most of what we have. Two thousand eight hundred miles to see what we can see.
I have known Ms. Eyre for 18 years now … what is that, like 6000 days or so? She has always been a major curiosity for me. I am amazed by the human she is, I have loved watching her reveal herself, walking with her through all of her interests and relationships, travels, jobs, heartaches and triumphs. In 2800 miles I hand her over to the wider world and learn how to watch from a far perch as she builds a life for herself.
The other day she drove away, for the last time, from the house she grew up in in northern Vermont. Her dad sold it this summer. That was one of her homes, her main place, for 18 years. Her first, where she and her brothers had loads of fun. There were a bunch of kids living in that neighborhood when they were young. It was a hoot.
Today and tomorrow she’ll say good-bye to her friends here in southern Vermont and we will point the car west and start burning a ton of petrol.
Home, that’s where I want to be, pick me up and turn me ‘round …
Take me home, country roads, to the place I belong …
Homeward bound, I long to be, homeward bound …
Sweet home, Alabama!
Can’t find my way home …
Like love, there are a gajillion songs about home.
Ultimately, of course, it’s the people we’re with in a certain place and the things we do together that make such strong feelings of connectedness. It can also be the geography: mountains, certain trees, the light all play into our feelings and memories. But more than anything I think it’s the people we love and where we are situated with them that make for those strong feelings about home.
We had a memorable Thanksgiving together in Tahoe.
I watched Sam walk away into his new life there, claim his own story and build a community for himself.
The kids jumped on the trampoline all day, swam in the pool, with their friends in Charlotte.
The long, gentle beach days, laying around doing nothing on Martha’s Vineyard.
The Tiwa men I met in Taos, their kindness and humor and wisdom.
My own first feelings of freedom in the Adirondacks.
All of the events of our lives have to happen somewhere and we learn to associate those good feelings we have in relationship with the place where they happened. Some of us feel these associations much more acutely than others.
For a time I felt I was always searching and seeking for a place to call home. I’m over that. This whole world is home to this soul. I probably am experiencing other life situations in other places right now. Sometimes I get breakthrough moments, those sparkly nanoseconds that I think are tiny openings in the weird portals of our lives. I am an old woman in a gold mining town in California. I am a quiet woman in a Nordic environment. I am small, poor boy in a grungy world somewhere in northern Europe. I am an Apache child, riding free and wild across the western plains.
In this life adventure I have felt resonance with all of those cultures and places. And I have met people in this existence I’m sure have been (are?) with me in those times and places.
The story is larger than you and me and as mysterious as the night sky. I’m not interested in figuring it out, as I was when I was young. I am only interested in living it until my living days in this experience are through.
xomo
Home for me is in Saratoga Springs, New York. I left home when I was 19 years old, and only returned when I retired in 2014. I think I feel home because I am connected with my ancestors who settled here in 1866. My roots are here. Like you, I traveled until it was time to remain still and that is when I came home. Have a blessed trip. Love to read about your travel history. Be safe and travel well.