On a cool autumn day in 2018, Jeff and I drove through the gate of the apple orchard in Virginia that we had owned for 23 years (but would not for much longer) and made our way down the grassy hill, through the trees we’d planted, to the simple cabin we’d built. A little numb, I fingered the key to the cabin door before inserting it into the lock. It’s okay, I thought. It’s time to leave all this behind. I felt solid in our decision to sell and ready to carry it out.
But when I opened the door and stepped inside, I was overcome by a feeling not of sorrow, but of being home. The room I stood in, and the small loft upstairs, were entirely ours—our things, our tracked-in dirt, our unique smell. My body relaxed in a way it had not in many months. Before me were the windows we’d worked so hard to put in, and the coat hooks Jeff had whittled from apple twigs he’d found. My grandmother’s kitchen table, where we’d eaten many a candlelit meal, looking up to the mountains. My parents’ folding chairs. A sense of deep belonging entered me. I stood still for several minutes, reveling in the feeling. And then I set about taking it all apart.
The previous autumn, in 2017, we’d packed up our long-time home on the North Carolina Outer Banks with the help of devoted friends. Shedding tears as we worked, we loaded it all into a tractor trailer and moved to Maine. Since we didn’t yet have a permanent home here, we put most of our possessions in storage and took up residence in a furnished rental house. It was pretty and comfortable, but it wasn’t ours. We were simply biding our time. So when we returned to the orchard for the final time, and I entered the small house we had created and filled with things we loved, I was nearly overcome by a sense of release. Ahhh. I’m home. How long will it be, I wondered as I packed up oil lamps and pillows, antique apple boxes and old family furniture, before I’ll experience this feeling again?
Home is a word that in me evokes instant feelings of welcome and ease, because as a child my home was a place of comfort, and my family was generally kind and open to others. I know that’s not universally the case. For some, going home to family evokes mixed feelings at best, fear and panic at worst. There were times in my adolescence and young adulthood when I experienced such sentiments.
But even then I still carried the positive sense of Home, if only as an abstract concept—which is what it is for me now. Two years after we began packing up our Outer Banks home, Jeff and I are somewhat settled in a house of our own, in a meadow on the midcoast of Maine. The house is still under construction; I’m afraid it may be another year before we’re comfortably nestled in. We took the last of our belongings out of the storage unit only two months ago, and many of them are still boxed up in the attic.
When I was a young woman, I cherished the notion of making the world my home—of traveling freely and feeling at ease wherever I went. I still love this idea. There are people who manage this—I’ve met a few—but I will never be one of them. Instead, when I travel I take with me the solace of having a home to return to, somewhere I can put down my bags with a sigh and a sense of deep contentment. Now I have a house to come back to, but it is not quite Home, not yet.
There are moments when, in a world with millions of refugees, my still-slightly displaced feeling strikes me as incredibly self-indulgent. I wonder how long it will be before those being made homeless now by wars and natural disasters will feel safe and complete in the places to which they’ve fled. I think of the newest Mainers, refugees from Africa who are preparing for their first winter in apartments in Portland, Brunswick, and other cities near us. How different life will be for them in the coming year. I think of them bundled in warm clothes, eating hot food in their new kitchens, safe and comfortable, but (I imagine) still in a state of shock.
I think of my friends on Ocracoke Island whose community was devastated by Hurricane Dorian a few weeks ago, and wonder how long it will be before the drying out, mucking out, and home repairs are through and their lives return to normal. Home still exists for them, but for now their community is a place of heartache and toil.
To be comfortably at home and at peace makes it possible to be your truest self, to relax at a level beyond what’s possible in the outside world. And to be home in a place you’ve chosen, among possessions you have selected and arranged, with friends and dear ones nearby, is to feel complete in a way that’s not possible anywhere else.
“Will you be home this weekend?” a new friend asks. I answer yes and am a bit surprised that it feels true at a level much deeper than implied by my casual assent. As I say the word, my body and mind feel a small release. Home, where I am building a sense of self in community. That’s where I’ll be.