Home

I am so very far from home, journeying across country to help my daughter establish a new home, if even temporary, but possibly longer than that.   We decided to make an adventure out of this, planning on a drive across and up and down to national parks, through a few of the remaining states, we have not seen in previous trips independent of each other. We are driving, miles and time passing behind us.  Pennsylvania the hardest state to traverse. It seemed endless.  Is this intentional, I wonder?  Long enough to make her think twice about it?  Look, we haven’t even gotten halfway across Pennsylvania, it’s not too late to change your mind…every pot hole and random exit seems to suggest….  OK maybe they aren’t random, but they seem so, to me, a New Yorker, proud, if not always near poor from paying taxes to cover the cost of well-lighted thruway rest stops and long stretches of smooth asphalt thruways, that I seem to appreciate now more than ever.  Home, a good place to have.

I find myself thinking of home and family and what it means, now. Here.  Faraway from it.  What it meant before, 5 years ago, ten, thirty, and more…home a series of varied locations, a series of different styled buildings.  A railroad flat in Queens, a cape cod on Long Island, a ranch in New Jersey, a dorm room, the apartment above the bodega back in Queens, a shared almost Victorian in Rochester, a farm house with farmland in Western New York, the tract home back in suburban Rochester, the modest contemporary in Rhinebeck, the eclectic make-shift home in Rhinecliff, and now a new one still.  Johnny Cash singing “I’ve Been Everywhere” comes to mind as I recall these homes while bringing my daughter to her new one.  

I've been everywhere, man.

I've been everywhere, man.

Crossed the desert's bare, man.

I've breathed the mountain air, man.

Of travel I've had my share, man.I've been everywhere.

I once dreamed of having only one.  That one that your children are born in, grow up in, bring their children to visit you in, and you eventually die in, content and happy.  Where sugar plum fairies live and visit each Christmas and every wall is filled with photos and mementos that tell your story for you.  That dream was dashed, and grieved over after the move from one and then another and a few more after that.  I have wanted that place, mythical seeming, where my aprons hung, my children hummed, relatives and friends gathered eagerly with ease and excited delight. I don’t even wear aprons and my children hum wherever they are. Home, where people feel welcome and walk right in.

As I’m driving so far from home, I suddenly feel I need to know what it is, a tangible definition.  Home - noun; the place where one lives permanently, especially as a member of a family or household.  OK, that makes sense, and the permanently part makes me... homeless?. Home – noun; a place where something flourishes, is most typically found, or from which it originates.  Hmmm.  My daughter and I have been driving in a minivan for a solid week now.  Shit is flourishing, all sorts of it, I’m sure.  So we must be home?  The stuff that is flourishing is flourishing because it’s 108 degrees in the shade in this vehicle.  The greenhouse effect is…rather affecting us.  And I will just throw this gem out to the Universe: my first and best ex-husband donated this vehicle to the cause.  He might have been a little giddy about throwing me into the bowels of hell as he proclaimed the air conditioning and the brakes were recently fixed.  I can’t help but feel I am doing my penance in this flourishing petri dish on wheels, but he has just doubled up his bonus points to bad karma and by now he should know….I survive.  It’s what I do.  Best.  With grace even.  Oh my gosh! Look! it’s true…I’m flourishing, I must be home!!! And if the brakes give out, after several full day visits to several Brakes Plus storefronts, I’ll surely make it to that other home in the sky.  Right?

In order to survive in this sweat lodge mobile, happily, I have been driving with a wet pair of old navy skivvies on my arm…hey, we are resourceful…if nothing else. But that’s kinda funny, because we are plenty more.  One especially brutal afternoon of driving from Omaha to Valentine with a pit stop in O’Neil, Nebraska I noticed my driver’s side arm, (that would be the left one, apparently I’ve been in the car too long) was starting to singe from the sun.  This is after all the Oregon Trail we are on, and once your skin starts to sizzle and bubble and spit like a good hunk of bacon, you’re fair game… so I thought it best to wet down said skivvies, apply compress to arm and drive like the wind… (Even with the wet skivvie I am starting to resemble a Nathan’s hot dog on the hot dog roller at Nathan’s Original Coney Island….which reminds me of home.  Home - adj. of or relating to the place where one lives: My father drove me to The Original Nathan’s hot dog stand in 1981, on my way to college to ensure I remembered where I came from…Since I was going to school in mid-town Manhattan, it would be impossible to forget.  I felt very much at home once I was back in the city, from whence I came, plus or minus a few subway stops…. (Incidentally, the skivvies are actually my daughter’s shorts, but skivvies allows for a little artistic license.)

In sports, home: noun; the goal or end point, something to aim towards.  Home in on… My daughter is making her way across country to reach a big goal.  To start fresh. To get healthy, as healthy as she can now become.  Maybe she is going there to live, or to stop worrying about dying.  Sometimes a place can feel like it’s killing you.  Sometimes it can feel like it saved you.  

The further along we drive, the more she questions her decision.  She just learned how to survive in New York, she says.  She had access to all the best hospitals and oncologists, she mourns.  She had a support system a hundred people strong, she continues.  Was she being selfish or irresponsible or making a mistake?  Because we are flourishing, even outside of the greenhouse on wheels, I can assure her, her fears are logical.  Her choice is still good, right.  She is aimed for home in Portland to pursue her MFA.  Sometimes we need to leave home to find ourselves.  I think of so many of my contemporaries that regret not taking chances, following their dreams, seeing the world.  I am happy for her, for her courage.  I know it comes at a cost, but I also know she is cautiously courageous and does not make choices impulsively or without careful consideration and intent.  We discuss her statement about learning how to survive versus being able to live with some ease.  She isn’t losing her support system.  She has made new contacts and connections along the way, working tirelessly on ensuring things go smoothly when she arrives, sending messages, e-mails, contacting friends of friends, alumni, professors.

I have been asked by caring loving friends and family: How can you let her go so far from home?  Why is she going now?  There are many answers to this;  I am letting her go, because she has never been mine to keep.  I could not make her stay any more than I can cure her of cancer, or keep her from feeling anxious, or make pigs fly from my ex’s personal digestive exhaust system.  I have been celebrating her desire to go.  Her determination to make cancer a very big, unappreciated inconvenience, but not a reason to stop living, or limiting her to a small life.  She has strong instincts.  She does what is best. She will always be at home in my heart, never too far from me.

When we make it to Portland, and we will, in spite of the 4 wheeled brake-less petri dish, that has actually helped us to grow and flourish and come together, she will be “home”.  And she will find her way back to me, to home.  I think of tales of long lost dogs that find their way back hundreds of miles away, of birds, homing.   Home- verb; (of an animal) return by instinct to its territory after leaving it. 

I had grieved that one concept of home for a long time.  And grieved some more.  And wondered why it was out of reach for me.  And then I moved again recently, and something happened.  Something good.  Reassuring. Loving.  I realized home was where I decided it was.  It was not what I left behind.  It was not a specific location.  It was not a great failing in me that I was not going to share one place with my children through time.  It was in fact all of those little quotes and messages that are hand embroidered onto pillows, and wall hangings.  Home is where you hang your hat.  Home is where your heart is.  Home is the nicest word there is, according to Laura Ingalls, and well, she had that little house on the prairie and survived all sorts of home style adventures.

Right now, so far away, I know  exactly what and where home is.   Home; where my love lies waiting silently for me.  OK.....he’s probably at work and he’s not the silent type, but he’s waiting and he’s loving and he’s good.  In that best way good can be.  Home is how he described feeling soon after we met, and went out and decided to set up camp to get to know each other.  In trying to describe the ease, and comfort, the familiarity, and yes; love.  Home, he said.  I feel like I’m home.  I can only smile widely, concurring, thinking back. Anticipating my return, home.

Tonight, somewhere east of Portland, and north of Boise, my daughter happily proclaims tomorrow is her one year anniversary. A year ago she received her diagnosis of stage 4 breast cancer.  She wants to celebrate her survival. We talk about how or what... we decide she will be home.  How awesome that it coincides, she states, happily.  How awesome I am here with her on this journey, I think to myself, my smile revealing so much love and gratitude. 

Home is where your journey begins.  Home is where your journey continues.  And home is where your journey ends. 

Ahh Home. Let me come home
Home is wherever I'm with you.... 

      - Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros