[Image: “Ever Onward (Helen Putnam Regional Park, Petaluma, California),” by John E. Simpson.]
Big news (well, big as “news” from this quarter ever gets): The Missus and I have found a new home, after nearly two years of a road trip spent in temporary accommodations (and nearly four years since our last real house). No real details to share here, but in general, the new place is in a small town in North Carolina, just a little west-southwest of Raleigh.
Honestly, we stayed in several areas we could’ve both happily called “home,” given different circumstances: upstate New York; the Green Mountains of Vermont; Nashville; Sedona, Arizona; northern California… In a way, I think, we may have been using our time on the road exactly to help us coalesce around a mutually satisfying type of place to settle in.
I think we’ve found such a place. Which brings me to a handful of readings from the past week…
First, from whiskey river:
We came on the wind of the carnival. A wind of change, of promises. The merry wind, the magical wind, making March hares of everyone, tumbling blossoms and coattails and hats; rushing towards summer in a frenzy of exuberance.
(Joanne Harris [source])
…and:
Compassing
limitless is a faraway place
way beyond the rock-strewn ridge named possibilityit’s over there
through a tangle-thick forest the old ones call maybe
it is a fortnight’s trudge through what could be
and at least as far as a strong man can chunk a stone
—straight as the crow flies
a hard tough row across the mind’s breadth
a frog’s hair from probably and head high from unreachable
you can’t get there from here
but you can get here from thereunfurl the map
aim the compass well
cause true north does lie
dead reckon instead on reality
find yourself there
(J. Drew Lanham [source])
Some years ago, on the Quora question-and-answer site, someone asked me to answer this riddle: “What does the expression ‘you can never go home again’ mean? Have you experienced this in your life?” In answering it, I drew mostly on memories of the small New Jersey town I’d grown up in. But I concluded more generally, distinguishing the notion of home as a physical, geographical location from the notion of home as something virtual, something shaped in our minds… and asserting that it’s the latter which is more “real”:
You can almost always return to Home, The Place. But — eventually — you can never return to Home, The Actuality. It’s as gone as gone can be. Those big maples along Third Street used to drop all their leaves in autumn over about the same month-long period, and you could smell the aroma of curbside leaf fires (which were still legal, until they weren’t) that whole time. I used to think about that aroma, those glowing and brown particles of smoke drifting up and through the air, eventually settling on neighbors’ lawns and out onto the surface of the river. Those particles are still there, in some form — I was right about that. But eventually they stopped being added to, and eventually the trees themselves were gone, and now few people in the town remember or think of any of that. They’ve all got their own homes, homes they’ll eventually never be able to return to.
We’ll all just have to carry Home, The Actuality, around with us, until our own blood stops pumping. And then Home, The Actuality, will have some new and just as unrecoverable shape: whatever Home is, it’s not something “out there” to return to. It’s something inside, to which we can all return (or not) as we want, as often as we want.
(JES [source])
We won’t actually move in for a couple of weeks, but yes: we’ve got a new Home, The Place. I have no idea under what conditions we’ll eventually leave it; I know we will, though, and eventually of course not return to it, for “real,” ever again. In the meantime, it’s up to us to fit it into the loose-fitting form of Home, The Actuality — to fit it into our hearts.
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