I have always been a homebody. In high school I liked to hang out with my dad and watch old James Bond movies on Friday nights, and I always preferred to eat birthday dinners around the dining room table with my parents, Kyle and Hannah over going out. When Hannah married Josh and they started celebrating Christmas at my house each year I was relieved, because home is really about having everyone all together, and Christmas would have been improper without my big sister. When my family moved to Florida during my freshman year of college, I was beside myself, kind of spun wildy out of control, because I couldn't stand the thought of losing the comfortable familiarity of what I thought was 'home.'
One thing I have learned over the past few years, though, is that home is where my family is. When I went home for college summers, to our house in Florida, it felt almost instantly right - the change of 'venue' had not changed my home. It was where my family was. Some of the sweetest summers, the sweetest holidays of my life have happened at home in Florida even though I didn't 'grow up' there. Though maybe I did, in a more true sense of the words.
Last week I got to go home. From Sunday to Thursday I woke up in my double brass bed, my parents' first bed, across the hall from my brother, twenty years old, six and a half feet tall, snoring. I walked downstairs and said hi to my mom, reading her Bible in the red library, and missed my dad leaving in his suit because I had slept in every morning. I did The Southwest Florida News-Press crossword puzzle in pen every morning, ate my mom's chocolate chip cake every evening, and laughed with my brother and my dad every day, repeating lines from The Office, and spent hours with mom discussing many things, primarily clothes, shoes, friendship and books. It was perfectly delightful.
And then I came home. It's funny, isn't it? Now I'm married to Mark. We live in our small, brick house in Ardmore (in a state neither of us had ever really known), with our enormous moose dog. We have pictures on the walls, and our own friends and church and favorite Mexican restaurant and electric bills. We belong to the YMCA, shop at the Food Lion down the street, watch movies on the couch my grandfather gave us when we got married and enjoy the occasional luxury of cake from Maxie B's bakery in Greensboro. When I saw Mark step out of his work van at the airport I felt this familiar rush of comfort, which I realized is similiar, though also unique, to the comfort I feel when I step into the foyer of my house. In Florida. In North Carolina. They're both home and Mark, who is the richest, most blissful embodiment of this idea, this amour, this attachment, is also the feeling of home. Many sides of the same globe, which is my heart, a glowing sun all burning and fiery with love for home, my family.
I don't think I have to decide. I have tried - to call the house in Fort Myers with the pool and pictures of me as a toddler "My.Parent's.House." And likewise, I have tried to call this house, "our new house." But I kind of love that they're both home.
This is a quote by Charles Dickens I have on the dashboard in my car... It has been there for three years:
"When I speak of home, I speak of a place where in default of a better - those I love are gathered together; and if that place were a gypsy's tent or a barn, I should call it the same good name notwithstanding."
Amen.
