Whispers and Shadows of Home

Home at first was a downstairs rental apartment on Stewart Avenue, about a block from Kroger’s where Dad ground hamburger and cut up steaks while Mom took care of my older sister and me. It was where we sat together on the floor eating chicken salad sandwiches and watching John F. Kennedy’s funeral on TV. It’s where I tumbled off the porch and onto a barbecue grill, the place from which my dad carried me up the street to the hospital and I got my name in the paper for the very first time.

                                                                    

Home became a four-bedroom house where two brothers joined the family. There was an upstairs and a downstairs that formed a circle through which we could run from room to room to room. The yard was small but there was plenty of space for friends and play and imagination and running barefoot. The front porch seemed its own room where Dad rocked slowly on the porch swing, listening as Bob Prince kept track of the balls and strikes and wins and losses of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Home was a place where Dad hung psychedelic wallpaper in the bedroom where I pined over imaginary boyfriends from Tiger Beat and cried over real ones who broke my heart. Upstairs was where summer heat would cause me to lie with my head at the foot of my bed, coaxing the slightest breeze through the open window while listening to a train's whistle in the distance. Home became the place I visited after leaving for college.

Home as a newlywed was a six-hundred square foot converted summer cottage on a New England lake where my husband and I could swim and canoe at the end of a day of work. Pipes froze in the crawlspace during the winter and snakes gathered there in the summer. There was space in our bedroom only for our bed; the other we used to accommodate our dressers. When family came to visit our home, we pulled out the sofa bed and set up cots in the hallway and in the kitchen. The town’s building inspector condemned the house’s chimney, and we celebrated our first Christmas day together by tearing it down to make way for a new one. We stuffed the opening with insulation, wrapped plastic over the front of the house, and kept the thermostat set at fifty-five degrees rather than allow our fuel dollars to seep out into the winter air. Home was where we were cold but happy, and where we learned how to be married people.

Home moved around the corner and down the road; two houses away from the Nathan Hale homestead, a house the American patriot never called home. We brought a puppy home to that house; he was something to feed and clean up after, and he loved us unconditionally as we waited for children to arrive.  An empty bedroom sheltered a brother who came to New England looking for work; the dining room hosted a murder mystery party where he met his wife. We described ourselves and our house to an adoption agency, and this place became home to our baby girl. There she helped us raise chickens and gather their eggs. Home was where I heard the news of my father's brain tumor and where I mourned his death.

Home moved again, several towns over. We bunked for several weeks with friends until Christmas Eve when construction was finished, and the home became ours. We left it a week later and traveled halfway around the world to bring home our son. A piano became our first piece of furniture in an empty room and music began to fill the space. Dad built a play scape and our children learned to ride bikes on the cul-de-sac. Neighbors hosted Easter egg hunts, and children and fathers gathered in each others' homes for story nights. A fire ring in the back yard invited us to sit quietly together on summer evenings until mosquitoes chased us inside. Yellow school buses came to carry our kids off to kindergarten before home became school. When it was time to move on and I closed the door for the final time, I wept, shutting behind the place my babies had grown up.

Home became an open, hospitable, light-filled house with a pool in the backyard and room downstairs for our children to host their friends. With a state park located nearby and Dad’s office just around the corner, I imagined filling this home with memories of happy family times together. The teen years and adolescent angst showed up uninvited, however, and memories of anger, and slammed doors, and tears inserted themselves into the history of this space. Storms rose and subsided and home was where I learned to embrace the feel of carpet beneath my knees as I waited for them to pass. Our daughter came home and woke in her bedroom on the day of her wedding. Home is where her gown still hangs, left behind in a closet.

Home is empty now as our children are moving away and into homes of their own. Artifacts of childhood remain in empty bedrooms and the hallways echo with ghosts of activity. There may be new homes yet to come--smaller ones with fewer stairs, requiring less maintenance--before I reach home for good. And when I move in I will see that all of the good things, and none of the bad, from each of these places have been but whispers and shadows of the home I’ve been longing for all along.

Joining Peter Pollock's One Word Carnival:  Home

And with Jen and the sisterhood at Finding Heaven Today: