Coming Home

My friend Ed sent me a nice note earlier this week after my first post. He supported my declaration of  committing to writing, my first love, as he has recently done returning to pottery his first love. I responded to his note because he called our choices a homecoming, and I couldn't agree more.

Home is a tricky noun. When I was young, it was a physical place, the house you see pictured here. A 1700's farmhouse in Bolton, MA. After my parents divorce, home was a feeling that I had in Maine where I'd spend all of July with my father's family and all of August with my mother's family.

Three days after I graduated from High School, I moved to Maine. I rented a room in my best friend's house on an Island. Within weeks of the move, I met a man building a ferro-cement sailboat, and for the better part of three years I lived on it. The idea of playing turtle, taking your home with you wherever you went, was deeply satisfying and soothed a deep ache in my psyche. We literally sailed off into the sunset together on Pinion ~ from Maine to St. Croix. Deciding to leave the boat and move to Portland was the most gut wrenching decision I've ever made. Home was not only the boat but who I was with, the man on the boat, Ron.

College years entailed multiple living situations, but my home was Portland, ME. My sense of self; who I was, wanted to be and would be came to fruition there. A summer at Radcliffe, in the dorms on Ashe Street, followed by four years living in a rented room in Brooklyn, didn't erase my Maine identity, but rather mythologized it.

Then came the 1990's and my move to the Bay Area. I never intended to stay there for as long as I did. It is a very seductive place. I moved from Boerum Hill to the sleepy surf town of Moss Beach, CA. I kept comparing the Pacific ocean, the sands, the fauna,  and the critters to my Maine Atlantic shores and animals. I went "back East" every summer to Maine. I lived in San Fransisco for 12 years. First in a studio, then apartments and finally in a house we bought in the Inner Sunset. It was a grand Edwardian that I never felt was ours. I kept waiting for the parents to come home. It was three stories tall, with a flat back yard, a basement and single car garage. In you know SF real estate, you know that was truly grand.

I had children. First a just under 9lb. girl when I was 35, followed by a just under 10lb. boy when I was 38. I had always been in touch with my physical self and had a fairly healthy mind-body connection. But after becoming a mother, and joining the human race as a producer of human beings, I knew for sure that the only real place that I ever had lived and ever would live is in my body. Surrendering my body, mind and spirit over to my children was how I finally grew up and made a home.  My soul, heart and mind, when it's wiring isn't corrupted, keep me safe and sound.

Now, as my children are getting older, I'm having more time for inner reflection and committing to recollecting for them the stories of all my choices that has made me who and what I am. They have been asking for these stories, as have my students, and even some close friends (who still find it hard to grasp all the branches of my family tree, let alone all the points of the atlas I've visited or encounters that have been character defining experiences).

So welcome to my home ~ the life of the mind. I'm hoping you visit often and that I can make it comfortable, complex, challenging and authentic so that you may feel compelled to contribute comments or just give me a call (how old fashioned) sometime. We are the stories we tell and the architecture of our homes is how we choose to arrange the tales. Thanks for reading mine.

(Photo Bolton, MA 1972)