Home - Blame Cionaudha
I grew up moving every one to two years. All over the US. “Home” is definitely your family when you are so mobile. They are the only consistent entities in your life. So, family, whether dysfunctional (aren't they all?) or close, or people you would choose not to know, are your shelter and touchstone.
When I was old enough to move out, I did - I fled, actually - to the oldest, quaintest part of San Diego I could afford. I wanted vintage, charm, character. Anything besides the endless, normal, suburbs I had lived in. But, it was still San Diego. Still palm trees and succulents, which always left me rather cold. Even if it was near one of the most beautiful places I know - Balboa Park. I would walk a mile to work and back each day and pass houses I REALLY wanted to live in, ones that I thought could be home. Old, wonderful places with flower gardens and history and Morris Minors or old rounded Volvos sitting at the curb. They became like old friends that I would look forward to seeing every morning. It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned it’s not necessarily the house that makes a home. Or, at least, not the whole of home.
I moved to Northern California to get away from endless summer and brown. It ALMOST felt like home because of the trees and rivers and places you could go pick fresh produce to bring home and “put up”. But even more, it felt like a gray, cold, solitary confinement too much of the time. And more than the fog and mold, I finally could no longer tolerate the slovenly, pseudo-spiritual, me first (me only), hippy-dippyism of the place. It was painfully beautiful, and finally just became painful.
So now I’m back in San Diego, my birthplace, my hometown in between all those moves. But, for all the things that you can't help but love about San Diego, it still doesn’t feel like "home" to me. I'm quite sure I was born on the wrong coast, maybe even the wrong continent. Or maybe the best one of my past lives was spent on the other coast and it still calls to me.
I live in a typical Southern California suburb, with stucco and palm trees everywhere. Except my house. It’s painted Cape Cod gray with white trim and a dark blue door. It has an arched white wood arbor and gate we put into the ubiquitous fenced yard. I’m building a brick patio and cottage garden. I REFUSE to have a palm tree anywhere. I want a maple tree in the front yard that turns colors in September, even though in our arid climate and clay-like soil, the roots run along the surface and tear up every thing in their path. I would love to have a tree-lined street that is covered in wet red and yellow and purple leaves in the autumn. In short, I want to live on the street Cion wrote about, and I’m trying to create it here.
There was this moment when we were vacationing on Cape Cod a few years ago. The girls were small, three and nine. My husband was there to attend a conference, and we had been playing and swimming all day. I had to drive about 15 miles to pick Tom up in the late afternoon. I scooped the girls out of the water, wrapped them in towels and put them into the back of the rental car - Natalie still in a car seat. It had become cloudy and drizzly. We hit the main road, along with what goes for rush-hour traffic in paradise. We crept along wet, tree lined streets, past beautiful cottages. I looked in the rear view mirror and the girls were like angels asleep with wet heads leaning into one another. For a moment it was so perfect. I was The Mom, with My Children, driving to pick up My Husband from his day of work, following my day of nurturing. We were suspended for a brief moment in my idea of my life as I would like it. I was home.