It's a perfectly reasonable question, often exchanged between new-found acquaintances at parties or other social events, and complete strangers sitting next to each other at a bar.
"Where's home?"
Or, the question is expressed as:
"Where you from?"
Or as:
"Where'd you grow up?"
The answer is not always straightforward. In fact, if all three questions are asked, there may be a different response to each one.
I've been thinking a lot recently about these questions, the first one in particular, because this month I said good-bye to a place that I haven't called home in more than four decades -- but is still as much a home as I've ever had, or will have.
***
Glance at the relevant statistics, and one thing is clear: Though a goodly number of us Americans live in or reasonably near the community where we were born, we tend to move around a lot (as much as 11.5 times during our lives, on average). So the notion of what and where "home" is can be fluid: It might be where the proverbial heart is, or simply where the US Postal Service delivers your mail. Or both.
For almost 35 years, my home has been just west of Boston, in the house my late wife and I bought. It's the longest amount of time I've spent living anywhere, and we put a lot of time, work, money and love into it. We raised our kids here, and my wife died here. Who knows? I might wind up dying here, too -- hopefully quite some time from now, and due to natural causes, rather than, say, trying to fix the toaster with a fork.
But from when I was nine until my early 20s, home was in the upper Hudson Valley of New York. Prior to that, in reverse chronological order, I'd lived in Astoria, NY, Cambridge, Mass., and -- for the first several months of my life -- New Jersey.
My mother and I got an introduction to the valley a year before moving there, when she worked a summer placement with the organization that eventually gave her a full-time job. Mom found a place to rent a few miles from her office and so, shortly after my school year was done, we -- along with our beagle/basset mix Margaret -- arrived with our stuff to move in.
I was not unfamiliar with the countryside: My father and stepmother lived in Vermont, and Mom and I had taken plenty of rural excursions. Now, here I was, walking with Margaret across the big lawn in back of our new house, looking out at the pastures, meadows and hills that began just beyond the driveway and garage.
Several hundred yards away, Margaret and I found a creek with a tiny "island" in it, and without hesitation she jumped in, splashed around, and frolicked in the mud. She certainly had no qualms about being there. Neither did I, but I didn't get much of a chance to settle in, because I spent most of that summer in the UK with Dad, and didn't return until a few weeks before school.
Nonetheless, I got used to the place. The town had gone through a transition during the past few decades, especially along the main road close by our property: Where there had been farmlands and open fields now stood several Levittown-style suburban housing tracts. But we sat alone.
Well, not exactly alone. Our landlord kept cattle in the pasture that stood between us and the main road, as well as the one farther off in back of us. I could look out my bedroom window and see black angus grazing, or hear them lowing, especially when the feed truck came. I tried befriending them, gave a few of them names, even offered the occasional inspirational speech. They were singularly unimpressed.
Fortunately, there were plenty of kids in the area to play with, even though their houses were five to 10 minutes walk away instead of just outside our door. We explored the woods and fields; sloshed in and around the creek; played sports -- I had a backboard on the garage, and my mother made two small goalposts for the big side lawn to lend some realism to our football games (unfortunately, the west-side end zone sloped away dramatically into a ravine, so field goals could only be attempted on the east side); rode bikes; watched TV. You know, the usual boomer kid stuff. During winters, I had arguably the best sledding hill in the neighborhood; if nobody wanted to hike through the snow to share it with me, that was fine.
***
About a year after we moved, we hosted a kid my age through a program which gives inner-city children the opportunity to experience country living. When Karl -- who had never been outside of New York City -- learned there were woodchucks living near our property, he picked up our dog's leash and declared he wanted to go get one and keep it as a pet. Determined to be hospitable, I accompanied him out to the meadow, although I warned him we would almost certainly be unsuccessful (we were).
That night as we slept out in the yard, we could hear distant thumping sounds, and Karl wondered if those were giants walking around; I explained that what we heard were tiny explosives used to scare raccoons and other animals away from the apple orchards. Then Karl mentioned that he'd seen a ladder in our garage. "If I took it up into the hills and climbed it," he asked, "could I touch the stars?"
I may not have realized it at the time, but I think Karl's visit revealed how truly settled in our country home I was. I was hardly an expert on woodchucks, but I knew you couldn't just stroll up to one and take it home with you. I may not have imagined giants roaming the countryside, but I knew what all those noises were. As for touching the stars, well, a lovely thought but...
***
As I got older, I spent more of my time indoors. I tried to teach myself guitar, listening to Pete Townshend, Jimmy Page, Steve Howe, Greg Lake, Mark Farner and Martin Barre, among others, and seeing if I could possibly do what they did. More relevantly for my future calling, I tried my hand at writing and storytelling, albeit for private enjoyment. I'd pen short stories about heroic high school football players leading their teams to victory. I stapled together blank pieces of paper so I could create my own comic books of Spider-Man, Iron Man, Daredevil, The Avengers and other Marvel superheroes. I passed some key milestones, like getting my first jobs (working at a friend's rug and furniture store, and stacking hay bales in our landlord's barn), opening my first bank account and getting my Social Security number. I started thinking about girls -- quite a lot, to judge by my high school diary, the destruction of which I will ensure before I sleep the long sleep.
I never really thought about living someplace else, which is not to say I envisioned staying in this house forever. For one thing, I was pretty sure I'd go to college, which might well be in a whole other part of New York, or even in another state. But how much do you really focus on that stuff when you're in the early years of high school?
And then it happened. I went to college in western New York, and only came home for Thanksgiving and the semester break. And come summer, I stayed in Albany, because I figured I'd have a better shot at finding work there.
Halfway through my junior year, I went off to the UK and Ireland to do an independent study, which wound up lasting the better part of a year. I'd decided not to go back to college, so about a month after returning home I made for Albany again to look for a job while I figured out my long-term plans. I worked and lived in nearby Schenectady for close to a year.
My house was still nominally "home," but at best a part-time one.
Finally, I moved to Boston to finish my undergraduate degree, and I considered this as the definitive "leaving home" event. Besides clothes and the wicker chair in my bedroom, I packed all the things that were crucial to my life: my musical instruments, my LPs and cassettes, my stereo, my (manual) typewriter. If things didn't work out, whether at college or whatever came afterwards, I suppose I would've returned to the house. But I just didn't see that happening. And it didn't.
***
If I had returned, I would have been living in a quite different place than the one I'd left. About four years earlier, my mother had bought the property, and she began a series of renovations that gave the house a sleeker, more modern look without erasing its charm. I was happy for her, and I suppose for me, too, since it indicated she wanted to stay.
Things did indeed work out in Boston, so that's where I stayed (with the exception of two years in Worcester). But I wasn't finished with the house. I brought my girlfriend for a visit, and about a year later we were married there -- out in the back, just a little ways from where the west-side end zone had been. Our kids loved visiting the place: Lots of wide-open spaces to run around in, and no worrying about having to look both ways before crossing the street. They still cherish the memories of it. In fact, over the years, I've heard from any number of family and friends from across the age spectrum who remember the house and its surroundings with great affection.
There were some difficult conversations and tough decisions during the 2010s, and at last came the day Mom moved into assisted care. The evening before, we strolled around the house together one last time, Mom doing a little bit of impromptu yard work, and agreed that this had been a wonderful place to live.
***
Since Mom's death a little over three years ago, I'd slowly emptied out the house, coming by for a couple of days at a time every few months, as often as I could. There was no deadline I had to meet, which was a good thing, because there was a lot to go through.
Mom hadn't taken much with her to assisted living, and that which she had was returned following her death. So I had the sensation of visiting one of those scrupulously preserved historical homes from past centuries, everything left as if somebody was still living there: the furniture, her clothes, her voluminous library, all the kitchenware -- there was even some still edible food. Essentially, it was the house I'd known for most of my childhood. I slept in my old room, perused books I'd left behind or from Mom's shelves, even went through the Marvel Comics I'd collected from late elementary school through early high school. I couldn't help but take some pleasure in the visits; they were a getaway to a place that wasn't really home, yet had its familiar comforts.
It took me ages just to clear out her little office, overflowing with papers and materials from her work overseas, personal and business correspondence, financial statements, newsletters and photos. I felt compelled to sort through as much of it as possible; hours would fly by until I reached a point where I had to stop for a break, and then I would start on another task to make at least some progress. I began to wonder if it was possible for photos to spontaneously regenerate, because just when I was sure I'd gone through all of them, there would appear another cache.
At a certain point, the pleasure I took in visiting the old homestead was overtaken by the sense of obligation, the desire to wrap things up. When I made plans for weeks or months ahead, places I might go and fun things I might do, I always had to factor in a trip to the house.
I realized that I needed to make the place less hospitable to visit, or else I'd be stuck coming there for many more months. That meant putting the focus on emptying the house, even if it just entailed stowing things in the garage. So I cleared out the upstairs, where my old room was, and slept on a mattress in the living room, which was decidedly more uncomfortable.
Fortunately, there was a Habitat for Humanity branch very close by, so they took away some of the bigger furniture. The biggest milestone was finding a company to pick up all, and I mean all, of her books.
And then, everything was gone except for two pieces of furniture -- most significantly, the house's personality was gone, nothing that said anything about who had lived there. Except for the couch I'd slept on during my last three visits, there was only the little circular game table -- with a detachable top -- my mother had bought at a bargain basement during our Cambridge days, and which we used as a dining table. It had come with us to Astoria and then to the Hudson Valley. I don't remember if the table might have been the first piece of furniture that had come into the house, but it was the last to leave it.
***
Obviously, I could've gone about this whole business differently, but it felt like the right course. I am grateful for the fact that I had the opportunity to give the house a long goodbye; not everyone always has that option in such circumstances.
Soon, somebody else will call the house "home." There will be other people occupying its rooms, going up and down the narrow, steep little staircase that connects the first and second floors, spending time in the yard, relaxing on the back porch, and walking out into the meadows and hills.
Maybe one of them will be a kid, perhaps around the age I was when I first arrived there, or Karl when he visited the following summer.
And maybe that kid will try to figure out how to touch the stars.
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