Why there’s no place like home …

"... here I am 
where I ought to be
the space 
where I am me
in ways I cannot be 
elsewhere ..."

Do you ever re-read books?  I’ve read several books more than once and, right now, I’m revisiting a book I first read in my 20’s.  I usually read a book before watching any film adaptation, but with Karen Blixen’s Out of Africa, it was the other way round.  It was thanks to Sydney Pollack that I discovered Karen Blixen’s writing at all.  I visited her family home in Denmark last year and, later this year, will visit her coffee farm in Kenya.  Both places were incredibly important to her and it got me thinking about my own relationship to what I think of as home. 

I’ve lived in many locations, but the place I feel most at home, is where I am now.  I’ve lived in this house longer than any other, in a county that’s adopted me as one of its own.  Being home is something we often take for granted and it’s only when circumstances remove you from it that you realise how complacent you’ve grown. That’s certainly been my experience.  

For some months now, I’ve been crossing the Pennines to Lancashire, where I grew up, to support family through a difficult time.  It feels weird to live as a guest in a place you might once have called home.  In actual fact, I never lived in the house I’ve been visiting, but it still stirs up memories.  When I sit and have lunch in the town where I went to school, I look across at women of a similar age and wonder if they were classmates.  I doubt I’d recognise most of them because I left at 18 and never returned.  

To my generation, there’s something unsettling about staying overnight in the parental home.  For later generations, who may still be living in their childhood home as adults, it will be completely different.  It may just be me, but I find it difficult not to take control in the kitchen, for example.  At the same time, I’ll ask permission to eat things in the fridge.  I can’t get used to the single bed or the house rules, and stick to my own routines if I can.  It feels awkward though I sense shouldn’t be; I wonder if this is normal.  

In truth, whenever I’m away from home, I miss it. I never expected to be such a home-bird.  In my 20’s, I considered myself much more of a free spirit but, in reality, I was uprooted.  I just didn’t recognise it at the time.  When I finally found my place, I thrived.  This week’s poem is a celebration of home although, in truth, it only tells half the story.  It’s a celebration of place, yet we all know that home isn’t the bricks and mortar, but the people you share it with.  

When circumstances change, it may lead to a house move, which is a big thing at any stage of life, but huge when you are widowed.  Helping my mum to downsize, moving from a home she shared with her husband for 40 years, has been a humbling experience.  It has made me value my home all the more and resolve not to take it (or anything else for that matter) for granted.  I feel so utterly grateful for my life, my husband and my home.  

None of us can escape change.  Karen Blixen had to give up her farm and move back to the family home in Denmark.  She famously said, in her book Out of Africa, that she would not let go of life until it had blessed her.  In her final summer, at home in Denmark, she told a friend that that her life had indeed been blessed. 

My wish for my mum is for her new flat to feel like home.  May she be happy there.