Thoughts on...Home
I have a love-hate relationship with moving that makes me equally dread and anticipate days like today. This morning, I had an appointment to do the walk-in to check out my new apartment for the next school year. For a change, there were some nice surprises...I wasn't supposed to have a dishwasher, and somehow, I do...my first month's rent is $20 less than I thought it would be, the person before me left behind some nice curtains, etc. But as always, there were some negative points-the place seems smaller than I remember it, I don't think my current skills at parking a car are going to suffice to fit my vehicle in the required space, and there is a strange man with the air of a disgruntled Vietnam vet that sits on his front porch across the street giving me the evil eye. This makes me nervous.
Anyway, moving disagrees with me because of the unique combination of surprizes and disappointments that always ensue. Packing things up today made me think about moving, and the last place where I really felt at home.
I remember the first time that I ever moved, when I was nine years old. My new house had two stories, and up until then, I don't think that I had ever been in a house that had two stories. I thought it was a mansion, (it wasn't), but that one fact made me excited to move anyway. The house with two stories had a nice backyard, and eventually, a basketball court. It was home.
Right before my senior year of high school, my family moved again to a new house. It had the address carved in stone letters on the front. My parents timed the move when they did because they wanted it to still feel like "home" to me-that is, I would still live in it for a while before I went away to college. It worked. It was home too, at least for a while.
Within the past few months, my parents have moved to a new house. I have been there once for 5 minutes before any of their things were moved into it. It doesn't feel like mine (I don't have a room there), or theirs, for that matter. Since I moved to Bloomington about a year ago, I have felt a certain detachment from the place I used to call home. Rarely have I even been back there. I feel like the time I lived there was a whole other life ago; that there is nothing left there but empty air and echoes for me.
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against my hometown. To its credit, I don't feel like Bloomington is my forever home either. The apartment I am moving out of is rank with hometown emptiness. The apartment I am moving into literally IS empty. I am caught in this in-between where nowhere is home.
Mark that I said nowhere, not no one. I guess home is who you make of it...
posted by Michelle @ 10:04 PM
13 Comments
13 Comments:
Nice post Michelle. Some quick miscellaneous thoughts...
It is incredible, how much of the attachment we develop to a place is precisely because of the love and experiences we have had with other people there. This can happen regardless of how beautiful the place is too, though we can also often develop an affinity to a place for its beauty.
Yet even then, it often takes some time and familiarity to feel confident and comfortable about a place, just as it does with a new person that we are becoming friends with.
What power love and relationships have over our experiences (not to mention memory)!
I had a freaky neighbor once. She was this old hippy lady with white hair and too much jewelry who would bring over movies for us to watch like, "Nothing to Lose," starring Martin Lawrence and Tim Robbins, as well as cheap party favors to enjoy, I guess, while watching "Nothing to Lose." This movie, by the way, is awful, and I contemplated how a woman like this would attach to a film like that, enough to recommend it around town.
By the way, you find home in a person, not a place.
"By the way, you find home in a person, not a place."
Yes, but as I said, it is the personal relation and experience that also form the places where we feel at home, therefore giving places a sense of home too. We feel at home where we have loved and been loved deeply, where we have shared deep informative experiences with other persons, etc.
As soon as we know that those personal encounters will never happen again in a certain place, then the feeling of "home" there starts to erode, though we may always still have some sort of faded and nostalgic sense of home in going there, because of our memories.
New question...can we experience any sense of home, albeit lesser, entirely apart from persons? For example, is our own self (our own person) enough to create homelike memories merely from experience with another thing (such as nature) rather than another person? That is what I am wondering.
and is it possible to have multiple homes, such as 'college home' and 'home home'? I think its possible, since I consider both places near and dear to me.
and once and for all, can you house train wild rabbits? because there's some rabbits outside my bedroom that are soooo cute.
At the first house I lived at until I was nine, there was a nice old lady who lived next door, except she had some strange personality quirks. For one, she liked to attempt to run over small forest creatures with her lawnmower (I saw her run over snakes a couple times, but probably rabbits too). Sorry, Steve's last comment just made me think of that.
But also, on a different note, I would tend to think that a place is just a place until you have made roots there, and it seems that most often happens through connections with other people. For example, I realized after I got back from Spain how much Spain had begun to feel home-ish after a time. It had taken a while, but I had a "community" there. I would love to go back to that same city some day, but part of me is afraid to because I've lost contact with the people I knew there. In a way, it would be frightening to go back to a place I once knew and be a stranger again.
On another completely random note, you guy's comments made me wonder about the connection between scent and memory. Perhaps I am the only one to notice this, but it seems like I have certain smells that I associate only with home. Mom's apple crisp for example. I tried to make it in my apt. here a while back, and it didn't smell the same. Maybe it was because I think I left one of the ingredients out, but that's another story...
I will have to agree with you michelle on the scent being tied with a memory. I really feel that some of my strongest memeories are brought back by my smelling something that reminded me of a certain time/memory. I wonder why that is?
Old people all have unique smells. So do cars. Sometimes these smells are conjured up, and you begin feeling nostalgic.
yeah, old people smell weird. Ironically that was my exact comment to Michelle as I watched her type that response and she started talking about smells. Strange!
Woah, I didn't know this discussion was still going on. I'll have to check back here more regularly...
This smell thing, it reminds me of how tied we are to the physical world, regardless of how high we can soar spiritually and intellectually with our minds.
It really is incredible to ponder the idea that we have bodies! Just think about how a very inner selves are revealed through the body (expressions, gestures, sounds, etc.). The invisible, our selfhood, is miraculously made visible!
For all the abstract rationalizing, wondering, and imagining we can do, what a profound impact our bodies and senses (the material) still have on us!
oh yeah! the cat in the net. i would come home from a hellish day of school, and see that cat sitting in the net-dome, looking at me, and decide that my day really wasn't all that bad. it had a look similar to a look chris might have while sitting in a strip bar.
Great song to check out...
"Home" by Michael Buble
www.michaelbuble.com/
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