At my 50th high school reunion in Vero Beach, Florida, a classmate exclaimed, “isn’t it good to be home?” I was startled. Home? We’d arrived in Vero when I was thirteen and its school was the thirteenth I’d attended. I had lived in five places in New York and six more in Florida. The reunion was my first visit—and likely the last—since my parents left Vero 30 years ago. Curiosity took me there, but my childhood home was on the road. My home now is Denver, this marriage, this feisty city community, the nest I fashioned for myself when I was sick of moving, though moving had been the only life I’d known. From my 1967 Denver debut until buying this Whittier Victorian in 1984, there were ten more addresses, four in Capitol Hill, three on the Northside, three in Virginia. When Phil and I settled into this house and learned how its rooms met our needs, how our lives knit together here, I began to comprehend the concept of home. I still wax nostalgic when I reach the Lincoln tunnel, or get that first hit of New York City smell. I’m still washed with affection by Atlantic beaches, the palms and pines of Florida, landscapes that formed fractured segments of my growing up. But those places never stayed long enough beneath my feet to become home.
Home in afternoon light
Your writing prompt, should you choose to accept it: Close your eyes. As if it were an Om mantra, say “home.” What do you see?
Though born in Denver, my first memories are rooted in Stratford, Connecticut, the earliest standing in a crib at Nanny and Papa’s house, then of the third floor walkup, also in Stratford, where we lived till moving back to Denver where I started Kindergarten at Bryant Webster on the north side. I grew up, moved out, moved around, but always came back, and now live in Englewood where Gerri and I have lived in the same 1921 bungalow for the last quarter century or so. We tried to sell the place when we moved to the Western Slope for a few years, but three contracts fell apart at signing, and we wound up renting the place till we decided to move back. We’ve reshaped and remodeled over the years and now can’t imagine anywhere else we’d rather be. Guess it must be home.
And it was meant to be that those contracts fell through and you couldn’t sell it! Sit on your porch and watch gentrification come to you.
Home? Where I live. South of Park Hill, south of Colfax. 1926 bungalow. 25 years now. But my childhood home, after year 5, anyway, was in the woods, where I spent all my time when I wasn’t inside reading. St. Louis suburbs. But I haven’t been back since my dad died in 1992, after my daughter’s birth. Will be back for my first (and 50th) H.S. reunion this coming summer.
And that 50th will be an interesting experience!
Home is where I can walk into the backyard naked and pick fresh raspberries at 8:00 a.m. (Admission: If I eat them there I don’t have to share them!) Home is right here, right now, where I can turn the lights off and on in the dark because I know exactly where the switches are. I can walk straight to my bed from the living room after all the lights are out and I can get up to pee in the middle of the night and not trip or fall (at least not yet). Home is kinesthetic knowing.
Home is kinesthetic knowing. Wonderful. I too can walk this house in the dark.