Home Sweet Home. Home is Where the Heart is. Home is somewhere I hate being away from, and yet that’s exactly where I found myself one winter in 2002. My daughter and I came home to find a pot of split pea soup on the stove had burned nearly away, and completely filled our home with thick, gray, disgusting smoke. After frantically locating our pet rabbits who had taken refuge under the couch, and opening every door and window, we got out. But not without the smoke clinging to us and coating us in a thin stinky gray film.
Oh what I have learned. Smoke like that penetrates everything, walls, woodwork, paper, fabric, you name it, it infiltrates it and deposits its nasty smell. So we were, in a manner of speaking, at the moment, homeless. Not in the sense of having nowhere to go, and for that I am eternally grateful, but in the sense of being without our home.
My daughter was crying one night, missing home, and feeling guilty for this – feeling she had no right to be sad, the house didn’t burn down, no one was killed, she wasn’t in some catastrophe, nor did she know anyone who was, and so her problems seemed petty in comparison. They are small indeed compared to loss of life, but our homes are a huge part of us, I’d come to realize, thinking about this.
So I reflected on home and why we are so devastated by this, because we are. Home is powerful. How else do we understand people who rebuild the same house on the same spot after a natural disaster? How else do we understand trying to keep a powerful ocean from eating our house? How else do we explain Israel and Palestine and Yugoslavia and Serbia and Bosnia and on and on and on? How many wars have been fought to preserve our right to our home? How do we explain “homeless” camps where people carve out their own niche and fill it with their own collection of things, even in the absence of four walls? How else do we explain the need to go back to our roots, revisit our past homes, or the homes of our ancestors? Do we think we can recapture lost time?
I remember a book my daughter had when she was little, in which two birds lived in a “home” and decided they needed a new one. They searched and searched and found a variety of different homes, yet none suited them. In the end they managed to find the “perfect” home, which actually turned out to be their original home. They returned to their roots.
So what is this mysterious power of home? It’s not just a place for shelter, nor our things, if so, it wouldn’t beckon us the way it does. I think it’s like a second skin which enfolds us and all we love. It’s appeal is universal.