We just spent four days back on the farm in West Virginia. We spent time with family, I gave a reading at a farm dinner, and we tended to some family business-type stuff. It was a very productive time!
And when it was over I felt utterly torn. That farm is my first home. The house and I are the same age and some of the land has been in my family for seven generations. Roots grow deep there.
After sitting out on the deck watching deer graze through the pasture, rambling through the fields and woods with Thistle, poring over family albums, cooking in the kitchen where I learned to cook, sleeping in my parents’ old room . . . Well, as we packed up the car I wasn’t sure if we were going home or leaving it behind.
It’s an odd sensation–feeling so very connected to a place. I think I’m going to need to spend some time contemplating what “home” means.
Dictionary.com lists one of the definitions as, “a person’s native place or own country.” Now that would be the farm. I am indigenous to those 100 acres in central West Virginia.
Another definition is, “the place in which one’s domestic affections are centered.” Ah. Now that would be the house in Western NC where I live with my husband. He IS the center of my domestic affection.
So then. Perhaps I have two homes and will simply have to deal with the tension tugging my heart up and down this stretch of the Appalachian Mountains. Two beautiful places filled with people I love.
I think I can live with that.
You bring up a good point about where do adult children call home. Our three adult children all came together for Christmas and though they grew up in a modular home–we moved away from the deep in the woods home we started to build–it’s home to them, not the home we had hoped to build. It’s the memories, then, that make a place a home. You are creating memories with your husband. No matter where you live with him, it’s what moments you build together that create your home. Sounds like you have beautiful memories of your childhood home.
Yes, I like that very much! Memories make a home.
Sounds like something from your own writing! Maybe I subconsciously borrowed it 😊
“Heaven is my home… I’m just a passin’ through.” I have such mixed memories of so many different “living places,” but the best ones are the 70s and the farm life with three curious youngsters on a working farm!
Sometimes I think “home” is a place in time that doesn’t exist anymore!
Sarah, both Deborah and Susan feel like they are “home” the minute they step out of the car in the driveway. Thty say all of their stresses and cares melt away for a time while they are here. I think it has a lot to do with being anchored in one place while growing up. Those memories become imprinted on a person. Many folks move around so much due to jobs and other situations, that they don’t have time in one favorite place to become so centered in a “place.” I am so glad you kids had that chance. And, of course, Being in West Virginia didn’t hurt that opportunity! 🙂
I think that’s it exactly!
But, how can you say both places are filled with people you love when the WV Farm is now empty. No family lives there, only your memories. You were visiting a place, not people who live there. People make a home, not things.
Where I live now is exactly 3328.69 miles from where I grew up.
(I love Google maps!)
It’s a bit of a drive.
Home is Vancouver, the city where the Pacific Ocean meets the Coastal Mountain Range. Where a starter home, a little fixer up STARTS at 700,000$.
The average price for a nice home in a nice neighbourhood in Vancouver? 2-3 million dollars.
We live in a small town outside the provincial capital of New Brunswick. This town was settled by Empire Loyalists who fled Maryland in 1778.
I wonder if those people mourned for their first homes as badly as I do? Most likely far worse, because I can and have gone home again.
My stresses melt away when I walk the path near my parents “new” place, where they’ve been for 12 years, and I smell the sea air and look up at the mountains.
But, my true home is where my husband and my kids are. Will we ever move back to BC? Nope. Am I glad we left? Most certainly. But the Vancouver I grew up in is not the city it is now. Ugh.
Am I happy here? Yes.
If God would dump a massive mountain range somewhere that I could see it, that’d be great. 😉