It's funny how Substack works to inspire. I follow Sarah Bessey's Field Notes and today she introduced me to Brunette Gardens which is doing a series on going home again. Reading both entries on homecomings got me thinking. What if returning to a place isn't an option? What might "going home - again" look like?
Everyone has a story about growing up. Some people have memories of magical childhoods with devoted parents who made sure they felt secure and loved. I like knowing those people and I respect parents who work hard to make sure their children have magical memories of home. My husband and I did our best to give our girls a sense of wonder, and to some extent, I think we did a pretty decent job. Our middle child has memories of church activities (VBS, Christmas Eve shenanigans, running amok during adult choir rehearsals) and weekend cinnamon rolls. The youngest remembers saltines and jelly at the pool with her sister and a lot of singing Broadway/Disney show tunes loudly, wondering why we were never discovered as the next family music sensation. The oldest goes back to our Basset Hounds, coffee cake, the county fair, and Home Improvement on television before bed. We had our share of trials, but when these are the things they recall, I feel like they might be able to find themselves home again. Actually, our middle daughter just bought the house we spent the last 18 years in, so she literally did go home again!
For my husband and me, returning to our roots was never really an option. We both left home when we went to college and neither of us ever lived there again. I didn't even return for summers; I took classes year-round. We met and married in our college town, not where we grew up. From early on, we made decisions to separate our lives from the ones we lived as children and establish new priorities, create new practices, and enact new promises.
Neither of us were victims of anything untoward, nor were we brought up by parents who failed. Our parents all did the best they could with the resources they had in every sense. We weren't rich, but we never went hungry. We had fathers who worked too hard and drank too much. Our mothers found solace in their faith but had difficulty connecting to us emotionally for various reasons. He was the youngest of parents in their 40s; I was the first-born to a young couple. We both had siblings who lived on the edge (or just over it) and "perfect" siblings. We may have come into our marriage with baggage, but it all matched pretty well. All that to say, that we never went home again wasn't because of major traumas, but rather a thousand little ones that we didn't care to revisit.
Geography was a touchstone for both Bessey and Brunette. Geography for me might be deadly. Growing up in the southern tip of the Great San Joaquin Valley meant bad air. All the pollution from the Bay Area trickled over the Sacramento Delta to the Valley where the winds blew it south. As the Bay Area smog passed over industry and agriculture, it grew increasingly dense until it was trapped by mountains on three sides, right over my hometown. Valley Fever spores stirred up regularly, and the limited rain of winter combined with the heat of summer meant smog was the air we breathed. I was diagnosed with asthma at three. In the 1970s and 80s I survived, but the decades since have not cleared the air sufficiently for me to ever live there and be healthy. All the regulations in the state can't address the geology of mountains and valleys, even if every car is EV and no home has a wood-burning fireplace.
And so, the idea of homegoing is impossible for us. For me. And truth be told, I don't want to go back. The last time I was in my hometown was to watch my father's last days with congestive heart failure and then being trapped at the airport. (Which reminds me, not everything was lost. A high school friend whom I hadn't seen for 20 years rescued me after reading my saga on Facebook. Bless her!)
"Going home again" is out of the question, but what if I change the punctuation just a little: "Going home - again." We put down roots wherever we lived: three years, 12 years, 19 years. In each place, we tried to create a place that felt like home, not just to us, but to people who came through for moments or days. People told us that our house was lived in, not a showpiece--and it was meant as a compliment. The drum corps front ensemble felt at home as they filled up the basement and main floor with young adults on an adventure, sending them off filled with pancakes and bacon. New Year’s Eve parties where every guest signed a ceiling tile as a permanent reminder of a home. Friends, both ours and our kids' were only guests once before they became "family." The refrigerator is full, please do your dishes.
This year we moved again, just a few miles away from the house that our middle child bought so she could raise her own children there. We downsized by half, which meant a lot of purging and donating and selling things we thought we needed. Sentimentality wasn't enough to keep things around. (I took pictures of elementary artwork before consigning it to the dumpster.) We dug up clutter from our own childhoods that our mothers had made us take and we then moved around the country over three decades. It was cathartic to release all the stuff and just keep the memories that made us happy. The unhappiness went into the dumpster with report cards and broken toys.
We curated only things that reminded us of what is important to us. We have created a space of tranquility with remnants of beach vacations, old cookbooks, and small touches of history: his parent's wedding slides and a book I made of my mother's family going back three generations. There's nothing that brings up the things we left behind in our hometowns, but rather pieces that remind us that peace and contentment are choices we make daily. Wherever we are, we are home, again. It may not be in the backyard of the past, but it is a perfectly present place.
Whatever function in Substack that is supposed to notify us when someone links to one of our articles, as you did to mine above, must be broken, as I never received one and just stumbled on this by sheer accident. But I'm glad to see it now. And I'm flattered to read this riff on my own essay! I'm so heartened to learn how you've been able to go home - again! Bravo.