Change of pace, wind down for the evening. The NYTimes Style section recently printed an article on Mary Catherine Bateson entitled “An Anthropologist’s Take on Homemaking”.
In Dr. Bateson’s parlance, homemaking is not so much about decoration and renovation. Rather, it’s a metaphor for community, for the design of an environment — professional or domestic or societal — that challenges and supports its inhabitants, an ideal closer to the arrangement of a Samoan village than a perfectly appointed living room. “It’s critical that home not just be a place that you use whatever is there, but that it be a place you are truly responsible for,” she said. “It’s not just your home and you get to mess it up.”
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Homemaking, she added, is also a metaphor for longevity, a way of looking at the second stage of adulthood that precedes old age — what she calls “adulthood II” — which is the subject of her new book.
[…] __
“Home is a very important metaphor for me,” she said. “When I was working on ‘Composing a Life,’ I referred to it as ‘my homemaking book.’ How do you make a home when there is discontinuity? You are a single mother, there is a bad marriage, a job change. I started to define the word ‘home’ as an environment in which one grows and learns, rather than just a refuge. Think about where you started out as a little kid and you learned to walk. Sometimes there were things you tripped over. There were people who loved you but also made demands on you.”
I was born in New York City, but my parents took us to visit “Boston” (the Freedom Trail, Sturbridge Village) the summer before my sixth birthday. And for whatever reason, I was convinced that “Boston”, New England, was the place I wanted to live when I grew up. It took more than thirty years and a lot of detours before I actually relocated to New England, but this area — not just the climate, but the views along the highways and the attitude of its inhabitants and the way the light falls in the evenings — feels like home to me in a way that my actual birthplace never did.
Where is home to you? And how do you define it?
Davis X. Machina
76A Mount Auburn St.
Cambridge, MA, 02138.
Actually, from the days when they were still up on Mass Ave.
I’m having my ashes scattered over the Classics section. It’s already fairly dusty; I doubt anyone would mind.
Yutsano
My residence for right now is a small condo on the north side of Seattle. Home, however, will be up here and will stay up here. I have no desire as of right now and probably far into the future of living anywhere else on the planet.
Neutron Flux
The Flinthills of Kansas. I watched that Tea Party video earlier, and thought I was at work. But, family and all, so Kansas it is.
WereBear
I’m originally a Hoosier, and spent ten formative years in Florida. Yet when I fled north, it was North East, and even sitting in the Greyhound bus as it passed through Manhattan, I felt drawn towards it. I married a New Yorker, lived on Long Island, worked in the City and environs. Happy.
I was almost forty when I moved to the Adirondack Park of Upstate NY; and from the moment we left the Interstate, I was hanging out the side of the truck, drinking it in. Home.
Alice Blue
The south, specifically Georgia, is my home, God help me. It’s the most ass-backward region of the country in every way. I hate the summer heat. I cuss out the politicians on a daily basis. But the place is in my blood. Despite the fact that my husband and I occasionally talk of moving to Canada or the Caribbean, I know we’ll both end our days here. I don’t think I could bear to live anywhere else.
My dad was in the air force and I spent most of my childhood on air force bases all over the country. Where did we go on our summer vacations? Georgia–back “home.” That’s how my parents and my brother and I referred to it.
General Stuck
You can’t go home again, but you can find a place that doesn’t make you crazy. For me that was the south, or version of which in Appalachia Kentucky. Living and growing up there, I could never relax and always wanted to be somewhere else. Lived all over the country except in NE, never been there. I loved the Big Sky of Montana and living there, except for the brutal and very long winters.
But I am comfy as can be living in one of the few places in America where my anglo saxonage is not a majority, or barely one. I love the climate and the true multi culture of NM, from native murricans and hispanics and some orientals and blacks.
I am one of the few representative hillbillies which is a distinct minority group of human persons under the wide open western space.
SiubhanDuinne
Although I’ve lived in metro Atlanta an aggregate of longer than I’ve lived anywhere/everywhere else, it’s never felt like “home” to me. Or, to put it another way, “I don’t want to die here.”
Two places on the planet so far have said “home” to me. The unsurprising place is the Scottish Hebrides — my heart has yearned after the Western Isles since I was very young — and I have adored every moment I have spent in the Isles. (Not that I’ve visited all that many of them yet — and never, I feel compelled to add, in inclement weather!)
The other “home” place, to my great astonishment, was Israel. And I’m not even Jewish — well, there’s a family legend that I had a Jewish great-grandfather, but I can neither prove nor disprove that — but whatever, when the ElAl plane touched down at Ben Gurion
Airport on that magical late winter/early spring day in 1980, I disembarked and instantly thought –felt, in the cells — “I have come home.”
Very odd. Can’t explain it. And the likelihood of my ending up in either of those unlikely places is, well, pretty remote.
But FWIW, those are the places that say “home” to me.
Litlebritdifrnt
Home for me was always Lancaster, in England. I always refer to a vacation over there as “going home”, but I hit a point at some point in the last 10 years when I realized that home was here, my little acre in Jacksonville, NC. Due to moving about so much as a child, and then in the Royal Navy, I realized that I have lived in this house (since 1991) longer than I have lived anywhere in my life. This is home. However, due to the communist burial policies around here, I shall go “home” when I die, and be buried in the family cemetary, where all my ancestors are (and George Washinton’s too for that matter!) If they change the rules anytime soon and allow people to be buried in back yard gardens then that is where I will lay, in the garden that I love so much.
Oh and while I am at it don’t give me that “cremation and scattering the ashes” bullshit. I want my body to be in the ground and feeding worms. Cremation is a waste of good compost if you ask me.
Kristine
I’ve lived almost half my life in Illinois, and it still feels as though I’m just passing through. Hell, I’ve been in the same house since I moved here in the late 80s, and it has never felt like home.
So, I’m still looking. I would prefer to live in four-season land with hills or mountains. A college town appeals. I am hoping that sometime in the next few years, I visit someplace, look around, and hear that little voice in the back of my head say Yes.
slag
This is a very astute point. It’s all about environment. Our context and surroundings influence us in ways we don’t even understand. Which is partially why I find it funny that this point is made in the NYT’s style section. Context.
For me, my current and real home is pretty much the polar opposite of where I lived as a child. Environment. It makes such a difference.
Jim, Once
At the beginning of my brief stint in the inhuman services, new trainees were asked to share with others the name of the place they thought of as home, no matter how long they had lived there (or even IF they had lived there). I gave the name of a very small town in Iowa that I lived in for nine years of my childhood, that has now been destroyed by both tornado and flood in the same year – the same year that my next “home” in Parkersburg IA, was destroyed by tornado. My husband and I moved to Cedar Rapids, IA, some forty years ago, and you may or may not know what happened in June of ’08 to that very sweet place. So now I just say “Iowa – Iowa is my home.”
beltane
My experience is somewhat similar to yours. An NYC childhood in a tiny, underheated, rent-controlled apartment that changed when I was 13 and went to a summer camp in Vermont. It was like passionate love at first sight. Oddly enough, what did it for me was that a shop clerk in a ladies clothing store in Montpelier was kind to me, which was something I had never experienced in New York. It took almost another 20 years of dreaming, but I finally said “F**k it” and made the big move. I’m much poorer but also much happier.
Jim, Once
@Litlebritdifrnt:
This is exactly what I want.
Alice Blue
When I was a senior in high school, I went on a class trip to Manhattan. I swore to myself I would live there one day. Eight years later I moved there and lived from 1979-1981. I loved it all–the crowds, different foods, cultures, even the subway. I still refer to New York as my “second home town.”
Yutsano
@Litlebritdifrnt: @Jim, Once: Sigh. I see I’m going to be in the minority on this issue. Of course half my ashes go into a stream on Mount Rainier, the other go to a stream on Mount Fuji. Yes that one. In Japan. Yes it’s a cynical ploy to get my family to travel internationally. :)
MAJeff
I feel a little like a permanent nomad. Boston is pretty fucking close, but so is Minneapolis. I’m struggling, and struggling hard, with the new place I live, North Dakota. (I’m a city boy at heart.) But, whenever I get to the point where I’m starting to feel “settled in,” I get wanderlust and feel like it’s time to go somewhere else.
Anne
The North Country of Vermont. I had to leave to come to Massachusetts almost two years ago and am still in mourning.
geg6
My heart is always split in two. One home is right here where I live: small Ohio River town in Western PA. Rolling hills, Friday night football, glorious fall foliage…I have been to the south, the midwest, and the west and it feels completely alien to me (the Mid-Atlantic and New England feel pretty homey to me).
But I also feel instantly at home in large cities. I always had an affinity for the urban bustle, a love no one in my family could fathom in a child. My love of cities started with my beloved Pittsburgh, but has grown to encompass almost every one I’ve ever visited, with special love going to New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, DC, London, New Orleans, and (though I hate to admit it) Philly. I immediately feel like I belong there, like I was always an urban dweller in some innumerable past lives. Now, I don’t like all cities and there are those I really hate (Miami, Atlanta, Dallas, and Houston are the worst, IMHO). But they are usually southern cities and that may just be my prejudice of the South coloring my impression. And I stand by hating Dallas and Houston, regardless of where they are. Awful, ugly places with nothing at all to redeem them. Sorry, but that’s just the way I see it.
I’m happy here where I can live in my pretty little river town with my beautiful ‘Burgh right down the road when I need a shot of city life.
Anne Laurie
@Litlebritdifrnt: There were sufficient Vikings amongst my Highlands-by-way-of-Galway-Bay ancestors that I want the messiest possible cremation. Reduce the carcasse quickly, so’s I can get on to the next great adventure unencumbered.
fraught
BROOKLYN!
Yutsano
@Anne Laurie: Take out your body, most of the mourners, half the village, and a few sheep while you’re at it?
beltane
@Jim, Once: My father-in-law’s ashes are buried under a willow in our perennial garden, in close proximity to our deceased pets-a dog, two cats, and Snowy the pet duck. I shudder to think of what future archaeologists will say about us.
Cacti
Spent most of my formative years in Missouri where both sides of my family come from originally. I’m a midwesterner in my speech and demeanor, but I haven’t lived there for many years and am unlikely to relocate there again.
My teens and early adulthood were spent in North Carolina, a nice enough place, but it never really felt like home, and eventually I moved away.
By stroke of fate I now live in Arizona, the diseased rectum of America.
The place I’ve probably felt most at home in my life was California when I lived there for a few, too short, years. The laid-back, west coast cool of the place really has to be experienced to be understood. I love the Pacific and long to return to its shores.
Anne Laurie
@beltane: When I moved from the Bronx to a midwestern college town, I eventually started telling people there was an annual lottery where some NYC natives were selected to move out and make room for the millions of aspiring NYC residents. And some of them believed me!
demo woman
@Anne Laurie: lol. I grew up in MA., in the same town as Lieberman’s wife and a former head of the Peace Corp. There is nothing like small New England towns to instill love of country and love of politics. Although I live in the South and have for decades, MA will always be my home.
EDIT .. and love of baseball..
Crashman
The suburbs of a small city in Western Connecticut, in a raised ranch at the top of a hill covered in juniper bushes, at the end of a dead-end road. Grew up there and spent so many countless hours in the woods behind the house. They cut all the woods down after we moved and put up new subdivisions.
Out of everywhere I’ve been, Fall always smelled best there.
Backbencher
Jacksonville, Florida
Even though I have lived all over the country, and currently live in the midwest, Jacksonville is home. I know all of it’s faults and I laugh at all the jokes people say about Jacksonville. However, it is where I grew up and it is where all my relatives grew up. When I visit Jacksonville it feels like I never left.
I love cities like San Francisco, New York, Chicago and D.C, and I fantasize about living in a foreign country one day but I know that I will always make a trip back to Jacksonville.
I guess I define home as the one place I go where doing nothing more than showering, eating, napping, visiting, and watching sports is a full day.
bookcat
My first love, passionate, dysfunctional, idealistic, was Oregon. I lived there for years. I finally broke up 5 years ago and came “home” to Maryland. I’ve been biding my time here until I can screw up the courage to love again. I am about to start dating NC, there’s something about those green hills. I don’t know if I can ever love with such naive abandon as I did with Oregon. But as painful as that was it taught me that place is definitely important to me. But I’m a dreamer.
lahke
Another army brat with a wandering childhood, but Vermont’s always felt most like home. Not just the landscape, either. I remember sitting in the Burlington airport after having flown in from California, feeling very “at home” and wondering why–then I realized that no one in the whole waiting room was blond! Everyone looked just like me–a whole room of pale, dark-haired French-Canadian clones. Boring in the long run, though–I live near Boston now, for the work and the culture, the mix of restaurants and people.
Seems like there’s a lot of us up here–do folks want to socialize?
Bernard
Born and raised in New Orleans in the house i grew up in, lost to Katrina and now much better afterwards.
the lushness and humidity and rain of this tropical hellhole is such a wicked sensation only Oregon would be able to make me think of leaving this Wickedly Sensual old Whore of a City. Oregon has better weather. lol
Crashman
@lahke: I’ve always thought there should be a Boston Balloon Juice meetup. I could be wrong, but I think they did one out on the west coast a couple of months ago.
Mnemosyne
I’ve never been strongly attached to a place, really. Chicago still feels like “home,” but I’ve lived in Los Angeles longer than I lived there. Kauai was wonderful, but I suspect everyone who goes there feels like it’s home. ;-)
I identify more strongly with a quote from a Lois McMaster Bujold novel: “My home is not a place, it is people, sir.”
gex
I was born in Minnesota and still live, well once again live in, my hometown suburb of Minneapolis. I’ve traveled the country and the world (mom worked for Northwest Orient – Northwest Airlines – NWA – Delta).
After all that I realized that my favorite place in the world is in my back yard with my girl and my dog. And really, all I need are my girl and my dog. That’s home.
Lee Hartmann
Davis X: what a place.
Home is where you feel it. I lived in the Boston area for 30 years but now I’m back in the midwest and that is ok too.
Home is where your friends are.
sorry for the treacle.
tworivers
I’ve spent the almost my entire life in and around Boston, and am convinced that I’m a New Englander at heart ( a summer in San Francisco and a 5 month stint in Chicago confirmed this).
That being said, I’m not sure the Metro Boston area is my true home. I could definitely see moving to Gloucester (some people would call it a burb, but to me, Gloucester is its own entity) or Portland, Maine or Northhampton or Burlington or even Providence at some point down the road.
This is not to say I dislike Boston – I actually like it alot. I just wish it wasn’t so damn expensive to live here.
chapmansfriend
I have lived (with exceptions for schooling in Milwaukee and Iowa City) nearly all my life in a small town in Illinois, yet I never feel as much at home as when I’m in Manhattan or New Orleans or Montreal. Is it because I’m only there when I’m on “vacation” and therefore not dealing with everyday realities like rent and bills? Maybe. But in my heart I still believe I’ll live in one of those places before I die.
Gina
I’m torn. NYC, specifically Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, still has a big chunk of my heart (though the neighborhood has changed a lot since I left in ’98, not sure if it’d feel the same now). But recently, I also realized that here in good ol’ Coxsackie NY, smack in between the beautiful Hudson River Valley & the foothills of the northern Catskills feels very much like real home for me. I’m not too social, it’s more the physical properties – the small farms, lots of green, mountains, the Hudson. I love the seasons, I love the wildlife everywhere.
I don’t cry every time I leave NYC after a visit like I used to, but that took 10 years or so. In the best of all possible worlds, I’d have a crash pad down there, and the house up here. And some serious doggie boot camp for my hick dogs so they could handle city stays :-)
cleek
feel the same way about Boston. i attribute it to my Grandmother’s “Yankee” magazines (she was from Bridgeport, CT) and watching Boston sports with my dad (cause we got Boston channels in upstate NY). it always seemed like a smart, sophisticated, well-worn, urbane city – not over-done and scary like NYC, and not desolate like Syracuse or too small like Albany (my other two big-city references). i visited a few times when i was young and loved what i saw.
but i could also be OK in Rochester, NY (where i went to college) because it’s got a great “craftsman” vibe.
i love NC, but i still feel like a bit of an outsider. and i miss real winters.
burnspbesq
I’ve lived in OC since 1986, except for a two-year stint in NoVa, but it’s never felt like home. When people ask me where I’m from, I invariably answer “New Jersey.” I would move back to the town where I grew up in a heartbeat, and probably will when the kid is out of school, except for one thing.
That one thing is the crazy feeling I got the first time I went to Dublin. The feeling that says “this is where I belong.”
joel hanes
Somewhere on a high lakeshore in the upper Midwest; the archetype for me is Clear Lake Iowa, but thousands of lakes in Minnesota or Wisconsin qualify.
If my grandparents’ cottage at 947 North Shore Drive in Clear Lake still existed, I’d buy it and live there and die content.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
Yutsano
@burnspbesq: Irish roots summoning you home?
FWIW I get the exact same feeling every time I go to Canada. Almost married a Canadian partially for that reason.
Oh and I got the IRS bennie forms today. So I haz a major happy.
@SBJules: Similar climate and similar overall attitude. Only big differences: Sagrada Familia and universal health care.
SBJules
Santa Barbara County, CA. I was born 30 miles away, lived in the north county–farming, ranching, and oil country when I was young and in the city of Santa Barbara almost all my adult life. Love it here. The only other place I’ve ever been that seemed like home was Barcelona, Spain.
Ruckus
@Mnemosyne:
Born inside the city limits of Los Angeles. Have known very few people born there that are my age. They all moved from some place else after WWII. Except I’m second gen LA on mom’s side. But LA does not feel like home. Lived in many parts of the LA basin and none felt like real home. Lived in a number of places for 1-2 years at a time around the country. And none felt like home.
“My home is not a place, it is people, sir.”
And this is why I wanted to move to Christchurch, New Zealand. The people.
Mnemosyne
I did think of a place-based preference I have: I don’t think I could ever live away from a large body of water, whether it’s an ocean or a Great Lake. G feels the same way — when we went to Carmel (CA) for my cousin’s wedding, we stayed at a very reasonable bed & breakfast that was two blocks from the beach and he was in seventh heaven because he was able to take two walks a day on the beach all the days we were there.
@SBJules:
We go to Santa Barbara at least once a year and love it there. Too expensive for us to live there, though. If we were going to move away from LA, we would move north towards Ventura/Santa Barbara, not south to OC/San Diego. Just a personal preference.
joel hanes
Do not surround me with wreaths of flowers,
Nor place upon my body, the signs of a fetish,
Nor crescent, cross, phallus or sun.
But bury me in an apple orchard
That I might touch your lips again.
— Ed Sanders
cmorenc
I feel most at “home” at our second home out at Sunset Beach, a barrier island in the southeastern-most corner of North Carolina, where from my top deck, I can see the ocean a quarter-mile to the south and the marsh and intercoastal waterway two hundred feet north. The house is surrounded by lush subtropical vegetation, huge oleanders and a couple of palms in front, bamboo in back, and oleander/wax myrtle on one side and a huge hedge of cleyera on the other. It’s on an unpaved sandy street, which adds a Carribean flavor to the scene.
I make myself a blender full of pina coladas and sit out on my porch in a rocking chair or chaise lounge, meat marinading in the fridge waiting to put on the grill in the evening, surfboard ready to go to the beach if the waves are up, and I’ve gotten to know some good people in the surrounding houses as neighbors.
I have fond memories of some of the towns and places where I grew up, but when I go back to visit them I find that the ghosts of my youthful presence and the people who were there at the time, are all gone, and I simply see buildings and streets that have lost emotional connection with me.
moe99
@Yutsano: Seattle for me as well. I’ve lived here almost 30 years, and everytime I go away, I am so glad to be back. I want my ashes scattered in Puget Sound so I have a view of both mountain ranges and the downtown.
Nylund
Whenever i visit northern California, where I was born and raised and I see the hills, the redwoods, the bay, the beach…that is what feels like home.
davidj
I grew up in Chicago city, and my parents moved to a northern suburb in my late teens. The house they lived in there was “home” to me well into adulthood. Then, one day, as I was leaving my parents’ place with my wife and baby daughter to travel back to our little house in Washington, DC, I realized that I was going home.
Yutsano
@moe99: I am pinching myself right now my situation will be so sweet. A very nice secure condo in Northgate with a 15 minute bus ride to work that dumps me off maybe two blocks from my new office, plus every other fantastic amenity the city has to offer. I’m gonna be one content little queer man.
nipsip
I have lived in NC, GA, TX, CA, WA, MO, NY, NJ and MA. Midwest never felt like home. NC and GA were my boyhood homes and they have not grown well in the past 40 years.
NY and NJ were fine, NJ is really a lot better than people think as long as you are far away from Rt 9 and NY is not that overwhelming after 6 months.
I really liked San Carlos and surrounding area. Felt good. So did Seattle, especially Magnolia.
Lived in Boston for last 10 years and I can say that there are things in NE that I have not seen and more places to see than anywhere I have ever lived.
I vacation in Quebec City and really like it, however all things considered, I prefer the south of France (even Marseilles).
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: You may be in the minority, but I’m right there with you. Scatter my ashes to the winds, baby. No resting in peace for me.
As for home, I never have considered a specific place a home, though I have lived most of my life in MN. Instead, I find home in the people I meet who are on a similar journey. The people I have been honored to call friends–they are my home.
JenJen
Typing this from my phone and haven’t read all the responses, but I just can’t wait to. What a thought- provoking topic, Anne!
I surprise myself when I almost immediately answer “the Ohio River valley” and, especially, Cincinnati. I’m from Dayton originally, so Cincy isn’t even my hometown, but I really do love it here, and it feels like home, for certain. I’ve done some short stints our West and loved it, and lived happily for a few magical years in northernmost Germany, but nowhere but here stirs my soul in the same way.
The often-slushy and bitterly cold winters filled with football and bars, the always too short springs, when my Dogwood blooms, the humid and miserable summers of festivals, roadside sweet corn and Reds baseball*. But when autumn comes, that’s when I know I’d never want to be anywhere else. The smells, the leaves, the weather (!!), the sounds of calliopes coming from the riverboats, the comfort food, the football of course, the gourds, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the friends, the family. October only feels right to me in Cincinnati. Nothing but love.
Can’t wait to read everyone’s musings. :-)
*what a summer to be a Reds fan! I officially have Chapmania. 7 game lead beotches!
dhd
I don’t really believe that you can have an ancestral connection to a place without actually, like, growing up there, but I’ve always had an affinity for the unglaciated regions of the Midwest, specifically the “driftless area” in southwestern Wisconsin and the Appalachian counties of southeastern Ohio and southwestern Pennsylvania. I grew up in western Canada which is nothing like these places at all. Like Montana, it’s big sky, rocky mountains, dry air and bitter winters there.
So it’s strange that I discover that not only has my mom’s side of the family been in SWPA and WV for about 300 years, but my dad’s side eventually ends up in Athens County, Ohio if you go far enough back… and, apparently, they relocated to the Kickapoo Valley in Wisconsin because it reminded them of where they used to live in Ohio. I dream about someday living up a long, winding, steep-sided valley somewhere, where you can climb up on the ridge top on a humid morning and look out at thin strips of farmland floating over fjords of fog.
Yutsano
@asiangrrlMN: After my grandfather passed away last year, we finally complied with his burial wishes, which were to go to a river next to Mount Rainier, go over an old bridge at their favorite campground, and dump his and my grandmother’s ashes (she had died when I was 16) into the waters to become part of the mountain. It was amazingly beautiful and simple. After that we took the $1000 he had left to my father for a gourmet dinner afterwards with the entire family. Nothing special, no memorials, no flowers, just two sets of ashes melding in the water.
asiangrrlMN
@Yutsano: That’s beautiful. I like it very much. How you doing?
mslarry
I was born and raised in Park Slope, Brooklyn and though I now live in Venice, CA there’s still not a day that goes by that I don’t wish I could go for a walk in Prospect Park. I even miss my subway stop Grand Army Plaza on the 2 and 3 train. Every time I go back, I have to stop by Pino’s pizza and get a nice greasy slice.
electricgrendel
I live in Austin, TX but home to me is a small town in Alabama. Living in a city I often forget that the night sky is packed with stars. Every time I go home I always go outside the first night and just watch the sky for a while. There’s also a quality of the darkness in the South that I’ve never seen anywhere else. Maybe it’s because at home we’re in the foothills of the Appalachians, or because there are so many very old and tall trees but the darkness doesn’t seem to swoop down like it does here in Austin. Twilight is a slow submission back home.
Man. I want to go home now.
asiangrrlMN
After thinking a bit more about this, I would like to add that the minute I set foot in NYC, I felt at home. I hate crowds and people and noise, and I fell in love with NYC. I know it would eat me alive in a year or two, but what a glorious way to go!
frosty
After relocating from Southern PA to Southern CA for college and living there a few years, I passed a beanfield in Orange County one March while commuting to work. With the car windows open, the smell of a freshly plowed field hit my nose, and I realized this: “I MISS SPRING!”. I missed seasons. A year later I moved to Baltimore.
Much to my astonishment, I’m back in Southern PA. Love the green, the rolling hills, the semi-cool summers where you can throw the windows open. I’ll put up with the winters, just don’t send me two Nor’easters in the same week like last year.
Seems like the Piedmont is my home. Hoocoodanode?
Bmaccnm
I grew up in northern Vermont, lived in Portland, Maine, then La Paz, Bolivia, New Orleans, deepest, darkest Appalachia (Letcher-freakin-County Kentucky, people!), and for the past 20 years, the Peoples Republic of Southeast Portland, Oregon. I love Portland for all of it’s comforts, but my heart is in Maine or New Orleans, even though I know I will never live in those places again- too icy, too hot, respectively.
I’ve always been drawn to places that are Places, ya know. The Orkney Islands are places. Darwin, Australia, is a place. A local vernacular, a local culture, a sense that one belongs here, rather than drives, works and shops here. Buckman neighborhood, in PDX, is a place. Houston is not a Place. Phoenix is not a Place- they could be anywhere, or nowhere.
Mark
Awesome question. I grew up in the middle of nowhere in Canada but spent the summers in Manhattan. I lived in Toronto for a while and it was ok, but then I moved to San Francisco and it was totally right for me. Perfect weather and one of the rare places you can work in tech and live in a normal city.
I do miss periodically going to Boston. Gave me great stories – strangers don’t call me a douchebag in other cities and nobody flicks Canadian pennies back at me either.
electricgrendel
@frosty: I totally understand the “I miss seasons!” sentiment. I love Austin, and there is a different character to its seasons, but it is nothing like the difference in seasons back home. I really miss living in a place where summer isn’t a six month season.
Yutsano
@electricgrendel: Seattle seasons:
Summer = warm rain
Winter = cold rain
I had that on a T-shirt growing up.
N W Rain
I was born and raised alienated in the rural Northeast, lived in Boston, traveled around the US, lived for a time in Iowa and Wisconsin, a stint in DC, and then ended up in Portland, Oregon, which became the home I’d looked for my entire life.
Portland is big enough for a vibrant art and music culture, small enough that you can over and talk to the governor at a low cost fundraiser. And then there’s the glaciated volcanoes, the coast, the Columbia River and gorge, and those cathedrals of ancient forest, all within an hour’s drive. I have a small house now, and a little yard, with pear, plum, fig and apple trees, lots of berry vines, a happy kiwi vine, gardens with kale that grows all winter and no-care roses that bloom until November. I want my ashes spread on Barret Spur on Mt. Hood and the beach at Oceanside, but I want to live, here, for a long time.
Damien
I have lived in Los Angeles for about 5 years come November. I have wanted to live in this city since I was a little, little kid, and I wake up every day of my life thankful that I get to do so. I would never tell my family this, but I could easily never, ever go back to my birth state if I could know my family would come to visit me.
muddy
I grew up ex-pat in Iran. When there, we spoke of the States as home. When I was in the States on vacations I spoke of Iran as home, because that was where I lived. It was really like I didn’t have a home, both of those were just ways of speaking. I was born in the States on my parents cleverly timed vacation, but went to Iran at 2 months. I was never at all familiar with my actual hometown, which was the family hometown. Knew it later as a tourist.
When I was 12 I went to Vermont for my sister’s wedding (she married a 10 generation Vermonter in a small town). It was late August and it was perfect. I have traveled all over the world due to living overseas, but I only ever once had that pain.in.the.chest feeling of *knowing* a place like that. I just knew that Vermont was my home. When I became an adult and got to choose where I would go, I went. Many decades later, I still feel an intense love of place just by driving around and looking at the shape of the land. It never gets old to me. My love of the place is gut deep, bone deep. If I believed in past lifetimes I would think I lived here before. Maybe 100 different times.
There do seem to be pretty many Vermonters in here considering the size of the state. Interesting.
Yutsano
@muddy:
I don’t know if this is true still or not, but more soldiers in proportion to the state’s population have died in the Iraq War from Vermont than any other state. It was a very sobering statistic. Now these folks just need to go help New Hampshire grow a brain and not elect Rhodes.
moe99
@Yutsano: Will you be taking the #41? If so, we may see each other!
Yutsano
@moe99: Boarding at the Northgate Transit Center in fact!
HeartlandLiberal
Said by, sung by, and quoted by just about everyone for a couple thousand years,
“Home is where the heart is”.
One source I found attributed it to Gaius Plinius Secundas – Pliny the Elder, the uncle who dies in the eruption of Vesuvius, while his nephew Pliny, who wrote about the eruption, watched from across the bay in 79 A.D.
But I would also mention the immortal words of the great American Poet Robert Frost:
“Home is where, when you go there, they have to take you in,” from his poem, “The Death of the Hired Man.”
Home for me is where those who love me are, who greet me with a hug and words of comfort and solace, even in my darkest hour; where I feel safe and secure with those with whom I navigate these dark waters of life.
I think that trumps place, no matter the beauty of the landscape. It even trumps home, if home, where you were born and raised, is hundreds or thousands of miles away.
Home is where the heart is.
Swellsman
When I was growing up, my family had a kind of rundown little place on Emerald Isle, North Carolina. Emerald Isle is the western part of Bogue Bank, the southernmost of the Outer Banks.
By the time I was in my teens, the rest of the family had lost interest in the place. But not me. I had a place to crash after wearing myself out surfing; I had a place to crash after going to late late parties. (I always told the folks I was staying at a friend’s place because we were planning to surf Topsail Island the next day, but in fact we were both staying out until the party was done and then crashing at the beach.)
It was where I did all my most important growing up, where I learned about girls and surfing and parties, and where I could be sure I would be left alone when I wanted to be. The place had no phone, and cell phones weren’t yet ubiquitous.
After I finished my schooling I moved to Miami, but I always thought of Emerald Isle as my real home. And so, six years ago, I moved back. I live in a small, somewhat older place that requires a lot of work. But it is just me and my (now) two dogs (I got a new bulldog puppy about a month ago) and I’ve never been happier with my living situation.
This is Home.
J Fields
I live in northern Maine/western New Brunswick, Canada. I absolutely love it and will end my days here.
Having said that, home is the South. I grew up in East Texas/northern Lousisana in the 50’s and 60’s. (I’ve compared my childhood home to South Africa during apartheid or Germany in the 1930’s.)
Air conditioning was rare, but he heat never bothered anyone. (You tried to park the car in the shade.) The family matriarchs were still alive (and in your business.) We went barefoot for half the year.
If I could spend eternity in the heaven of my choice, it would be on my grandmother’s front porch on a summer afternoon.
fcc
Moved to Boston when I was 17, now 57 and living in the Nashoba Valley. Massachusetts just grew on me, I guess.
horseDave
Disclaimer: 1st post, long-time lurker
I grew up in Dallas and my ancestors for many generations have been Texans. I currently live outside of DC in Maryland but I’m still looking for my home. I know that its not here in Maryland. While I love my friends in Dallas, they’re mostly transplants, there’s a lot that I do not care for there.
Due to several circumstances including the wingnuts, I feel strongly drawn to become an expat. There’s place that from afar appeals to me and I’m slowly making plans to move.
I envy those of you who have homes.
Kilkee
Grew up in Massachusetts, moved to Portland, Maine, after law school and have grown steadily and constantly more in love with the place. When I’m coming home from a trip and that plane banks along Casco Bay, with the islands to the right and Portland Head Light to the left, especially if it’s nearing dusk, it’s as close to a religious experience as I know. I understand that having friends and family here is a big part of it, but somehow I don’t think I could have the same sentiments about some other places in the country.
That said, I love my grandparents’ ancestral lands in western Ireland, and if I had to choose where to scatter my ashes it would be a tough call. I suppose if we dump them into Casco Bay the Gulf Stream will take them to County Clare, so that might be the plan.
Ravi J
India. Rural, agricultural Area. Small Town of 5000 People.
Nature of my work allows me to travel across globe. Been to many countries in North America, Europe, East Asia.
JenJen
Wish there was a way to kick this thread, because I’m just enjoying the hell out of these responses, and think others might too.