Where's home 2

Well, I’ve already discovered something I don’t like about this blog business. The fact that the latest posting goes at the top of the page. With what I already detect as a tendency on my part to build on past “notes,” I fear that the logical progression of my thoughts...to the extent that there is a logical progression...may be lost. By profession I am a librarian, and order is very important to me. C should follow B which should follow A, not the other way ‘round. Wonder why They set blogs up in this way. Perhaps someone out there in Cyberspace will enlighten me.

I have been giving further thought to the idea of attachment to “home.” I have five brothers and sisters; all but one of us were born and reared in Texas. The one who was born elsewhere (Evansville, Indiana, during what I think of as our Norman Rockwell period) lived in Texas from toddler-hood on. She and one brother have remained in Texas for most of their lives – and I suspect they think of it as home, especially as my mother also lives there – but four of us have not lived in Texas for many years, and I think it’s safe to say none of us has any desire to live there. I don’t think any of us really thinks of Texas as home. For one of my brothers I think that is especially true since our mutual father and his mother (my stepmother) both died. Going back to visit them may have given him some sense of “going home,” but that’s gone now. For the rest of us, going back to visit our mother is a matter of going back to visit our mother, not a matter of going home.

Our homes were not a family-supplied given, but were the result of choices we made. One brother, decades ago, decided to try New Mexico, fell in love with it, stayed. One sister married someone who took her off first to Wyoming, then to Colorado. Although that marriage ended, when it did she had been living in Colorado Springs for some time and liked it, had a job as a middle-school art teacher, which she liked, and had a son with ties to the community – school, friends, his father. So she, too, stayed, and as retirement nears for her, she has every intention of remaining. It is her home.

Another brother is a cartoonist, and his work has pretty much dictated where he lived over the past twenty years. You can’t make much of a living as a cartoonist in Ft. Worth. So it was New York City, Los Angeles, then back to New York (but now having a wife and two small children, it was a house in Connecticut, rather than a loft in lower Manhattan). Actually, Bob may come closest to what I’m trying to get at here, because I suspect that for Bob – as for many people – “home” is where his family is. He is not so place-oriented, as people-oriented.

To a certain extent, I am, too. I would like to be able to say that Maine is my home. Certainly it is where I feel most “at home,” of all the places I have lived in the U.S., for all the reasons I mentioned in Note B. But I have no significant others here. The loss of my husband four years ago left a very large hole in my life, that nothing has come close to filling. This is true despite the fact that Micheal and I actually spent more of our 36 years of marriage living apart, than living together (we had what can only be described as a very unusual relationship). But I always knew he was out there, somewhere, loving me, just as I loved him – he was where I belonged, ultimately. So...I belonged somewhere! That seems to be what people need: a sense of belonging somewhere. Is that what the concept of “home” most represents? And if we don’t have that feeling, does it mean we have no home?