What is Home?

HOME FROM HOME 

I just got home from home. I know, that does sound odd, but it is what is (odd again).

I’ve lived in the same town for over 40 years and in the same house for over 30 years, but I’m not from here. I’m from the Black Hills of South Dakota and I always will be. I just returned from a wonderful trip there.

When someone asks, "Where are you from?" I have always found it hard to describe myself as from here. So I go home to where I’m from and come back to where I live. But now, after all these years, when we leave South Dakota I can finally say and feel like I’m on my way home.

My husband and children were born and raised here. They live among the familiar images and locations that shaped them.  However, my children have spent such good times with family in the summers and winters in South Dakota that they feel a little like they are from there as well.

For me it takes being back on those streets to conjure and revive the images and often the emotions. It feels so familiar and so affirming. And coming from a place that has in many ways stayed the same insures that comfort.

A photographer friend, Amanda Boe, provided a quote from Wallace Stegner for one of her shows. “Expose a child to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in shapes of that environment until he dies.”

For me it is more than perception of shapes, I am drawn back to that environment and will be until I die.

I once wrote about my belief that you can go home again, “Home is not an historical construct, home is always under construction.” And now I feel, that in spite of my heart drifting back, the construction has been continuing here too and my concept of home has expanded. So, it makes perfect sense that I can now say, “I just got home from home.”

You can go home again. I'm back in South Dakota

     I believe the saying that "You can't go home again." is not always true. I am home again in South Dakota, not in the house I grew up in, but with the people I grew up with. For me that's what makes it home, that and the streets so familiar in the way they look and even the way they smell that I sometimes feel tears bubbling up on my morning walks.
      I am grateful for the memories that come surging back as I pass my childhood home and the houses of close friends. And I'm equally grateful for the sense of home that continues to grow as I build new memories with my brothers, their wonderful wives and  wonderful children. Home, I believe, is a work in progress, not just a historical construct.
     My grown children are not here this summer, but I appreciate that for them this place will always be part of their sense of home. They have memories of running through the sprinkler on hot summer nights and at Christmas sledding down the hill by my mother's house in the moonlight. They have memories of happy and sad times with their family here. They have created home in this place and with these people and I'm comforted in knowing that "home" for them, as it is for me, is always under construction.