What is home? A Blog Off post
Every weeks, the blogosphere comes alive with something referred to as a Blog Off. A Blog Off is an occasion wherein bloggers of every stripe weigh in on the identical topic at the same day. The subject matter for this round of the Blog Off is "What is Home?"
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It's Saturday morning and I've been mulling over this topic considering the fact that we settled on it last week. So a good deal so that I decided to fly back to my fatherland to look my own family of course, but on the same time to do a bit of reflection at the very idea of home.
In my admittedly wild fantasy life, home looks like the photo above. An ancient, moldering pile of ochred plaster on an obscure viale somewhere in an Italian city. However, as a non-Italian, Italy could never really be home no matter how appealing the fantasy. But man, it sure is pretty.
Reality now looks extra like this, an old bungalow within the American tropics. It has its charms and it's sincerely extraordinary with the aid of the requirements I grew up with however it is more rife with caveats than I ever concept it'd be when I arrived right here.
Right now it's Saturday morning and I'm sitting in my brother's kitchen in Southeastern Pennsylvania, the land of my birth and a place more than a thousand miles from where I call home now. He never left and I couldn't get away from here fast enough.
Coming back years later, I can't escape the fact that the place is beautiful. The photo above is what I can see from his kitchen window. My brother's home and the land of my birth spans the divide between rural and urban living as he does. My brother is a cultured, worldly man and he proves what I know to be true. That it's possible to be in the country without necessarily being of the country. That's a distinction I could never see when I called that rolling-farmland-within-easy-driving-distance-of-Philadelphia home. In my mind back then, the very sight of cows meant that I was a hayseed and I couldn't handle it. So I left to look for something else.
My ancestors known as Pennsylvania home for loads of years and I imply that literally. They arrived in Philadelphia before america changed into the United States. The equal brother in whose kitchen I'm sitting and I as soon as stood in front of our earliest ancestor's grave marker and it hit me like a ton of bricks that he died proper after the Revolutionary War. The ancestor in question, Sampson Smith, arrived here with two of his brothers and I can consider them arguing about whether or not they must rebel from English rule. It has to were similar to the arguments my brothers and I get into over current events. Though the stakes were undoubtedly better inside the 18th Century, haggling brothers are and will usually be haggling brothers and thank God for that.
My roots run deep on this part of the sector and life in Florida has usually felt like borrowed time. The wild rhododendrons and maple timber I grew up surrounded through are in my DNA and I can no quicker purge myself of them than I can do away with my blue eyes. As I become old, I even have a harder time resisting the tug of my place of origin and the biases and allegiances I grew up with live with me.
When I pay attention a Philly accessory, irrespective of wherein within the world I am, I sense like I've met a person I've regarded my complete existence. No rely how lengthy I live away from there, that japanese Pennsylvania version of the mid-Atlantic accessory simply makes me experience comfortable. One of my nieces asked me for a pitcher of wooter the day prior to this and I ought to have hugged her for saying wooter instead of water.
Man, someone's feeling nostalgic.
To make up for my sense of borrowed time, for the remaining 20 years or so I've been guided by means of a quote from the super American essayist/ poet/ novelist/ playwright/ screenwriter Paul Monette. Monette wrote in one in all his earlier non-fiction books that "Home is the location you get to, no longer the vicinity you come back from." Despite any lingering misgivings I may additionally harbor for having left, that quote is so authentic it hurts. It might be proper had I stayed and it's maximum in reality real from a distance.
I'm not one to collect quotes, but that one hangs in a frame next to my bathroom sink. I look at it every morning when I brush my teeth. I believe it. Even though I live alone and I'm removed from the places the rest of my family calls home, my home is home. When I go see my parents or I come back to Pennsylvania, I call it "going to see my family." It pains me when I hear other adults refer to going back to the places where they were born as "going home."
For years, that idea of home, my home, has sustained me through thick and thin. When I landed in St. Petersburg around 14 years ago I found here a great community of friends. I felt very quickly that I belonged. My and our gatherings for holidays and card games and drop-bys were legendary. I felt then that I belonged in St. Pete, that my presence there mattered.
Even even though I was surrounded with the aid of folks who loved me, I was clean that they have been only a manifestation of some thing I become producing. My feel of home started interior of me and labored out from there. My beloved buddies and associates were reflecting lower back what I become sending out.
That started to change while the economic system tanked multiple years ago. Florida took it at the chin worse than loads of places and possibilities to earn a dwelling evaporated reputedly in a single day. One by way of one, the human beings I changed into close to in St. Pete started out to leave to pursue their desires some place else, in places where they may in reality make a living.
At the identical time, I started out visiting around the u . S . A . And certainly the sector as I sought to make a residing of my personal. So as buddies left and I left with growing frequency, some thing began to alternate. I observed myself developing impatient with life in a 3rd-tier metropolis and commenced to pine for the intense lights larger places. When I'd go back home, there were fewer and fewer acquainted faces to greet me.
My distraction and bizarre feel of isolation delivered with it something else, namely a hesitation on my part to generate a domestic for myself. The ultimate year has been a abnormal one and I blame my aging though it is not totally true. I don't quite sense like I healthy in St. Pete the way that I used to. My experience of belonging there is a lot much less extreme than it was once.
At the equal time, I discover myself looking for stronger connections with those who are not in St. Pete. I leave out my nieces and nephews, my siblings and their wives, my parents and my colleagues who are now unfold everywhere in the US and Europe. The vital mass of the human beings I as soon as clung to used to be in Florida but now that critical mass stretches from the DC burbs to New York. There are wallet of of them in Florida, New Orleans, Seattle, London and San Francisco too, however my attentions have shifted to locations aside from St. Pete. This mystifies me. I constantly idea that St. Pete was going to be home for all time, but I'm no longer so positive anymore.
So what to do about it? I don't know the answer and I'm in no great hurry to figure it out. One of the benefits of having survived to middle age is that I've come to suspect sudden changes, be they mine or someone else's.
Whatever happens, I know that it's up to me to generate an answer and a path forward. It's up to me to generate home, where ever that may be.
This topic has been a great one, and I'm glad to be able to vent my angst. Ten years ago I would have written that home was wherever I found myself but these days I'm beginning to think there's a bit more to it. So to try to address the topic at hand, home is where I love and where I am loved. Wherever that ends up being.