ROCK-A-BYE-BABY

14, May 2012              

I seem to be searching for home – something I’ve been doing either literally or metaphorically with some regularity all my life, but why now? I have a home. A lovely one: an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Is it because we are leaving it on Friday, for nearly 4 months? Is it because I’m feeling upended by recent events? Or is it because, when I raised the shade of our bedroom window this morning I found myself looking longingly down to a small roof garden, the lush greens of which felt like balm to my sorry soul?

                Maggie's photo

This little patch of greenery, really no more than 12’x14’, growing atop a 5-storey brownstone is – save for glimpses of the river – the only sign of nature to be seen in our immediate cityscape. I’ve looked at this green patch often in the 3 years we’ve lived here and have never once seen anyone in it; either tending it, reading a book or sunning there.

Why did this little roof garden cause such sadness this morning? After all I will soon be living on a farm deep in the Tuscany countryside, watching the sheep come over the hill at dawn and the cows amble down to the pond late afternoon. Apart from the rare passing of a car on that country road, the only sounds we’ll hear are birdcalls, the rustling of leaves, sheep-bells, the lazy mooing of cows. Once in a while a thunderstorm will arrive, followed by 15 minutes of torrential rain hammering the cracked clay soil, quenching the summer crops.

I long for this, and it will feel like home to me while there. Just as in the 2 weeks prior, I will revel in the Provencal countryside whose bounty of produce will seduce us daily. So why be sad? I know how fortunate I am to enjoy these experiences. And I mean ‘fortunate’ not lucky. I didn’t get this life through luck, but through sobriety and willingness to look at a lot of unpleasant qualities in myself: qualities that I often deceived myself with by refusing to take responsibility as an adult; often deceiving myself into believing there was something innately wrong with me, or that I was irreparably scarred by adoption, by the mental cruelty of my mother and the emotional distance of my father. It took me more decades than I like to admit to finally say, ‘so what?’ to the past and engage with the present.

The path to this life I now have was long and devious of my own making; much of it lived by the results of one misguided decision after another. All of them made, at the deepest level, unconsciously. Yet with enough courage to keep rising up and thereby convince myself that rising up time and again was the proof of my worth.

On the one hand there’s a great distance between choosing Happy Hour at a bar that has free cheese and crackers and living sober in an elegant apartment with a full fridge. But it’s only the time it took me to travel that distance that is long: the distance between denial and consciousness is as short as the time it takes to admit the former and in so doing, enter the latter.

I have lived the past 23 years sober, with a wonderful mate, intimate friends and deepening relationships with our children, in a variety of nice homes. Yet I can still experience a sense of homelessness on days such as this. Perhaps it is a new awareness of death that is triggering it and the fact that almost everyone says they want to die at home.

What is home? If it is, as the saying goes, where the heart is, then we’re always home. Personally, for me, it’s where the hearth is, a fireplace being a prerequisite.

As a child, the fireplace – or within a few feet of it – was the only place to feel comfortable in winter. In summer, home was the outdoors. The fireplace of my childhood represented not only physical comfort but physical intimacy: the four of us, until my brother left home when I was 8, and then the 3 of us until my father left when I was 11, would gather around it listening to the radio, reading, darning, doing homework. It also heated the water tank for the bath, the pipes to which in turn heated the linen cupboard. To this day, the sight of smoke curling from a chimney makes me want to enter its abode, pull up a chair and stay.

And stay. I think that’s the hankering for home that’s gnawing at me these last few days: a constancy of place, a knowing that ‘this is it’ and making a commitment to it. To wake up each day and fling open the same window to the same view, observing the subtleties of its un-sameness, the way the light falls, the changing colors, not just of seasons but of the hours, as the light turns the hill that was lilac at dawn golden by noon and blue by nightfall. To live simply, with  few necessities and meaningful objects. To tend the same garden, walking its familiar paths, nurturing the plants along the way. Yes I’d like to venture out into the world when the desire arises, but, oh, the return to home, to one’s bed, to the old copper kettle and the hearth.

Home for me is as much about what lies outside the door as that which dwells within. I like to walk out the door and be in the land, not on the street.

I’ve had a lot of homes, or places where I received mail: approximately 65, in fact. Some I ran from, some I was thrown out of. Most were rentals, a handful ‘owned.’ Some I furnished with crates and other materials found on the street, an aesthetic I much preferred to any that came already furnished. Every single one of them I did my best to nest in, once tearing up 2 huge sheets of foam into tiny pieces with which to stuff hand-sewn pillows. Here, a silk Salvation Army scarf, thrown over an ugly lamp; there, a remnant of fabric thrown over a soiled sofa.

Escaping to London at 16, from my parent’s home, I stayed for a few weeks in a women’s hostel where I shared a room with 3 other women; the room furnished only with single cots – lockers out in the hall housed our clothes. I personalized my corner of the room with a small sheepskin rug, a present from my brother, and some 100 matchbooks and boxes from all over the world which I had been collecting for a couple of years, many of them sent from pen pals in other countries. I can see them now, stuck or pinned to the wall like a crazy atlas: my first attempt at setting the world on fire. I would lie on the lumpy mattress and gaze at that wall as if it were my hearth.

I’m told I have a knack for making home and it’s something I love to do, but now I’m looking to come home to roost. I’ve been flying the coop since my blood mother tossed me out nearly 66 years ago and feel like I’ve spent my life looking for the place that can hold me in place.

But perhaps I’m fooling myself. Maybe I’m one of those restless souls still looking for the cradle I never had. If so, I have further to go in shortening the distance between that bit of denial and the consciousness that today’s reality is the only home to inhabit.