Lately I find myself asking where is “home?” Where is the place that spiritually never leaves me? David Brooks in his insightful and thought-provoking new book, How to Know a Person, muses that a person can leave home but their home never leaves them. In my experience, some people embrace their home and others spend their life trying to erase it. But we all have a place that is more familiar than anywhere else. Where, if we were fortunate, we spent our childhood. For me, home is where we go when no one else will take us in. Home is where we can just be. No judgment, few questions, just love.
Whenever I am asked where I grew up and what I call home, my answer is always West Virginia. The mountains, the air, the trees, the people, the colloquial language–it all represents my youth. It’s the place that first reflected who I was in this life and what my purpose might be.
Still owning a house there, a feeling of peace surrounds me every time I cross the Ohio River and enter my home state. When my kids were little, and we passed under the “Welcome to West Virginia” sign that hangs in the middle of the span of the bridge, we always honked. I now do the same with my grandkids and even if I am alone. It’s a a sort of “Hello there, I am back.” Much like my mother’s goodbye tradition of waving on the front porch long past our taillights disappearing over the hill.
After I married, I left my home and created a life in a new city that my children call home. Now that they are grown with families of their own I, like many people my age, am questioning if I should stay in the home their dad and I created for them. The four walls, the house, this address began as just that, a house. But through years of having babies and sleepless nights and first days of school and graduations and tears and laughter and heartache and repair, it became a home. The center of my family’s life. These four walls are filled with the sounds of all those years. Memories of the love we shared here that made this house our home.
Unlike turtles, we don’t carry our homes on our backs but in our hearts. And though not all of us have warm and fuzzy memories of where we grew up, it is nonetheless a large part of who we are and what we become.
Home isn’t always a place. It can be a warm embrace from a trusted face or the hand that reaches out just when you feel you may break in two. It can be the fragance of a familiar flower or the feeling the envelops you in the slow darkness of the twilight hour in a best-loved place.
For me, I still find home in the Appalachian mountains. The people have my grandfather’s Scots/ Irish sense of humor, his warmth, his easy conversations. The air smells clean and crisp even on the rainiest of days and the stars still shine brightly in the night sky. As familiar as it is though, twentieth century American author, Thomas Wolfe, was correct when he wrote the novel, You Can’t Go Home Again.
As adults when we do go home again, it is often not the same people. Many family members are long gone. Your high school has been torn down and redistricted for population fluctualtions. Restaurants are closed. Ball fields have new commercially sponsored names. But somewhere among all the changes, I still find a sense of peace I experience nowhere else. I slide back into a slower pace of life. In those mountains, I feel a safety unlike any on earth. I find a feeling of belonging I think many of us spend our whole lives searching for.
My nephew, who also grew up in West Virginia, recently sent me a podcast from Today Explained that explored the international, universal appeal and popularity of John Denver’s famous ode to West Virginia, Take Me Home Country Roads. Although it has only recently been officially made our state song, Denver’s ballad has become profoundly popular in the far reaches of the world. Folks in the United Kingdom sing it with tears of pride, Nigerians sing it and change the name of the destination. It is sung in Japan, Sweden, France–the list goes on and on. After exploring this phenomenon, the podcast delved into “why.” And finally they concluded the reason is quite simple. “Everyone has a home and every home has a road to it.”
Human beings inherently have a deep pull toward a sense of place.
A place to call home.