“Home is where the heart is,” a friend tells me. We are talking about where home is for each of us, which naturally involves WHAT home is. I counter his definition with Valley author Gerry Haslam’s favorite description: “Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Both of these descriptions implicate
people, describing home as a social environment. There can be no doubt about that aspect. All I have to do is be around my mother,
bless her heart, for five minutes and I’m mentally back in kindergarten. This aspect of home is what many of us are
facing as the holidays approach, with its mixture of blessings and re-livable
curses.
But for me, the word “home” always
involves a physical environment, with specific climate, topography, vegetation,
wildlife, even geology. This is to say
that home - for me - is also geographic, with a historical context that I have
in some way participated. It is a
permanent place where people come and go.
And when I go home in my mind, it is
to a specific place where I never lived, but visited often. When the homing instinct bears down on me, I
fly back to the “ranch” in western Washington where my Aunt Hazel lived the
best years of her life.
It helps that she often said she
bought the place for us, her youngest sister’s offspring, so we would know what
it was like to farm. It helped that what
little farming she did made her exquisitely happy, but it was more the life she
lived there on that place than any one activity. She loved harvesting the apples from their
little orchard and making pies and ‘sauce, as well as watching the deer come
down from the forest above to harvest their share. It was fishing in the creek and frying trout
for dinner. It was baling hay and putting up oats for winter, watching cats in
the barn catching mice. And it was
photographing all of it that made for peace in her life.
That place is home for me, I realize
now, because there is where I learned the basic truths of my life. That food comes from the land, and shelter as
well. That contentment is achievable and
worthy of pursuit. That I am an outdoor
person at root, and curious about the natural world, fascinated enough to learn
from books and from my own observations.
That intimacy with a place, a little piece of land, is priceless.
They say you can’t go home
again. I’ve never believed that, though
for most of us over 40 the places we once lived are unrecognizable now. We destroy home for ourselves every time we
obliterate bird habitat, push out olive groves, level fields for
development. But if, as I feel now, that
home is an intimate relationship between people and place, there certainly is
room for us to come home. May the
pending holidays help us stretch in that direction.
_____________________________________________________________
Trudy
Wischemann is a native Washingtonian who writes from home in Lindsay. You can send her visions of your home place
c/o P.O. Box 1374, Lindsay CA 93247 or leave a
comment below.
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