This week in our class discussion thread we have all been working to define and establish what our personal home is or can be. I have been mulling this concept (home) over and over in my head for a few weeks now, and for some of us in the class home does not necessarily correlate with a certain landscape. I want to believe that it doesn’t, but for now it is all I can seem grab on to.
In thinking of personal experience in association with place and home I am left thinking about shared familiarity. I find that the places that I have felt at home, and these places always carry shared experiences with another person.
Looking back at my connection with nature and the feeling of home from my youth, it was more than just the farm, and barn, and the white house with the porch like a moat. It was more than the , and the lilac bushes, and the apple trees that made me feel at home. The home that the farm was to me, was found in the sharing of place with my family. My establishment of home was shaped by a collaborative learning of who and where I was.
The farm felt like home because that’s where I learned from not only the people in my family but the land. It was where my mother bought my brother and I children sized hoes. Where we helped to till the ground, preparing the topsoil for seeding, and where we weekly complained and labored to pull weeds. Where we experienced the overwhelming amounts of dirt that quickly accumulates under your fingernails when dig with your hands. It was where our father showed us the perfect attributes and the advantages to spotting the perfect walking stick when we decided to climb to the top the property, our world. He always said that we would want to find something that came up to our chests, “It’s a leverage thing. Grab something light but strong.” The farm was where my brother and I discovered the irritable itch that comes from poison ivy and its three terroristic leaves that lined the tree line, and where bit into sour apples the size of golf balls (a lesson in patience).
The farm was home because I never did anything alone. Every moment outside was shared, every experience was teamed. And now, living for the first time, away from my family I have to create new experiences, I am learning how to find new ways to share them, and to build a home on relationships with a landscape and community that I didn’t grow up with.
Is it possible to change your established notion of home? Is it possible to truly change your perception of what it is? Can I make a new one, or will my home wear like a scar? Will I ever connect with any place the way I connected with the farm? I don’t know. Maybe when (if) I have kids.
The details in your memories here evoke an almost palpable sense of place for me. There's also a sadness, or maybe longing, in those words as well. I don't know if that strong sense that you felt can be repeated, similar but different, in a place that would allow you to feel all that you once did. I would like to think so...
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