You Can't Go Home Again
Wherein Our Heroine
Does Anyway.
I was raised in New Hampshire. I now
live in Maryland. I have lived in a variety of diverse places in between that
upbringing and current house.
In each stop along the way,
there have been a kaleidoscope of definitions of the word
home.
There are current homes, ancestral homes, homes that now only exist in memory
because they have burned, been torn down, sold or otherwise passed beyond your
use. There are temporary homes, places lived in for a few years, a few months,
or even a few days. On long, exhausting business trips I even found myself
stating that I was, "going home," when what I really meant is I was returning to
my hotel room. Entire towns or regions can be "home."
So, home can mean everything
from the place where you last dumped your suitcase to the place where you
learned to crawl, speak and play
Chopin.
Even now, as settled
as I am, there are two definitions of the word "home." One is the little
townhouse in the woods in Maryland: my current address, the threshold I was
carried across by my romantic husband, the place where my thoughts turn most
often. The other is the little house in the woods in New Hampshire where I
cantered around pretending to be a horse, wept over the multiplication tables,
and retreated to when I had an advanced degree but no career. This is also
where my mother still lives. Plenty of people quote the title of Thomas Wolfe's
novel and say, "You can't go home again." What they mean is: that home that you
remember, the complicated picture of the place where you grew up - it isn't
there any more. Walls will have been painted or moved, new memories created,
sometimes new people will be living there. The place has gone on without you,
and shoehorning yourself back into those rooms will not bring back the past.
So, loaded as the statement
is, I have returned home to New Hampshire. The house has changed. It should
change. A vital, living person lives within these walls, and it should not be a
museum. I'm not sure where to find some things any more. There is new
furniture and pictures have been rearranged. And yet, the
multiply-great-grandchildren of birds that rejoiced at the end of winter during
my youth are singing the same songs today. Daffodils are poking their green
stalks above the earth in the same places they did when I was small. The bed in
"my" room still has a perfect view of the
moon.
It is nice to be home.
Because it has changed, and because it is the same.
Posted: Monday - April 12, 2004 at 08:13 AM
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