Home

I visited with Ed & Eileen, their new daughter and son....

and I got homesick.

In talking with Ed, we got around to a discussion on where family resides, and how this can determine how close we are or are not to various members of our extended family.

When "family" is several states away, it can be hard to maintain a connection to its various members. This happens whether one is an adult or a child. They can quickly become strangers to us and we to them.

And as I watched Ed and Eileen and their children, I began to get homesick.

Not for the home in New Jersey where my mother lived, and my father lives, and where I grew up, but my Home in Massachusetts.

I grew up here. I still have a few friends here. But my Home is somewhere up north, in the mountains, in a place quiet and green and removed from the "family."

But there's family in Massachusetts. A different kind of family.

Over dinner tonight I remembered a time when I really didn't have a home. I was in school, working on a divorce and a thesis, and living somwhere between Here and There. I had a roof over my head--either a dorm roof or my parents roof or a rented room roof--but the roof and the space did not constitute a home.

I was, for better or worse, a transient. And I really didn't want a home. I wasn't sure where I wanted to be--which place would hurt the least.

When I finally decided to stay in Massachusetts, I needed an apartment. I found one, luckily (long story there), that was above my friend Ruthie. After four years, I'm still there. It's small and kind of dark, and the slanted roof makes me feel like a bat. Some might call it an "artist's garrett" but the only trueism in that term is "garrett"...because the light's not good enough for creating art. But my stuff's there, and I cook there, and I sleep there.

I have friends up there in Mass too. Friends I've had for several years now, who care where I am and what's going on in my life and with whom I share all the different parts of my life. Steady Eddie is part of "up there"--and we've been together close to four years now, too.

It started to dawn on me a short time ago that I wasn't really a transient any more. But, I still hadn't orderd delivery of a local paper, nor had I got involved in local politics, nor did I do any of the other stuff that would indicate I was putting down roots.

Yet that homesick feeling today, and the fact that the homesick feeling was for my home in Massachusetts, kind of drove home the idea that I have started to put down roots up there, whether I consciously wanted to or not, and that my community and my roots weren't really here anymore.

I grew up in New Jersey. I make my home in Massachusetts.


I like my home.

And after this is all over, I will be glad to go home.