The Home Place

For whatever reason, when we’re driving home after some evening event, Andy and I frequently have this conversation:

Ada: I always thought I’d end up in a big city, like Chicago, New York, or London.

Andy: Ick! Not me!

In the British Isles, they have a concept called “the home place.” The concept is a central component of modern day Irish dramatist Brian Friel’s play entitled, well, The Home Place, but I’ve also run across the concept in other pieces of literature set in Ireland. The most recent reference of the home place I ran into was in Minnesota author Erin Hart’s mystery Haunted Ground. The “home place” is a reference to a member of the English Ascendancy’s old family home in England. It’s a place often shrouded with mythical symbolism that is only magnified by the person’s geographical distance from the location. It’s something used to define a person, even if it’s been generations since any direct relative lived on the land.

In the States, our sense of home isn’t tied as tightly with tradition as it is overseas, but our sense of home is just as complicated. We are raised on the American dream and a sense that home is something that travels with us, that with the unpacking of a suitcase we can simply will a new place to be our home. But it’s not quite that easy.

While plenty of Americans head overseas to find their roots, few find more than just a pleasant experience and, if they’re lucky, a deeper understanding of who they are. They usually don’t find a newly realized home. And maybe that’s because there seems to be an infantile understanding of home that haunts us well into adulthood.

I have put in time in the big city. I have proven that I am perfectly capable of living in dorms, in cities, in suburbs. But in all those experiences there was a strain of inexplicable homesickness that tinges such experiences. A sense that after all the newness is discovered, that this really isn’t the place I want to spend all my time.

Is northern Minnesota really my home place? It certainly seems to be Andy’s.

In the movie Orange County the main character, Shaun, finally runs into his writer idol who is also a professor at Stanford. After talking for a while, the writer/professor tells Shaun: “You’re a writer. Every good writer has a conflicted relationship with their home.”

We may not know where our home place lies exactly. But we certainly know when we’re not home and from that, through deductive reasoning, we should be able to determine our home place. When feelings of anxiousness or smothered longing are absent, we may find that we’re already home.

Where’s your home place?

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Being A Tourist in Your Backyard

Yesterday, as the result of an exciting new freelance opportunity, I had an excuse to spend the night downtown in my hometown. The NYC trip of April had started to fade into “far away” and frankly with the vast amount of highway construction along the one getaway route out of town -- Hwy 61 -- makes a quick day trip anywhere outside of the county anything but quick. Schedules have been consistently chaotic so we’ve pretty much hunkered down in the woods.

Time for a change.

Last night, even though I was only an hour away from the cabin and about five minutes away from my parents’ place, I was anxious for the excuse to shake things up a bit.

And the very best part was that my friend Kati agreed to be my travel companion. Since I sometimes look at as Andy as he walks through the door at the end of the day and think, “oh, do you live here too?”, you can only imagine what effect being uber busy and living an hour away from town has had on friendships. There was some much needed catching up to take care of.

We made the most of the time we had. For supper, we cooked up some wonderful homemade pizza. Then, once I was sufficiently full of cheese, pepperoni, and root beer, Kati suggested we go spend the rest of the evening playing some pick up soccer. While I was playing, I felt like I was 16 again, albeit, missing a bit of that handy hand-eye coordination I had back then in my soccer playing days. Today I feel like I’m about 60. Ya know, who needs knees anyway?

This morning, after a fitful night of sleep in a strange location, we headed down the street for a bit of breakfast. Afterward, although there were plenty of things I could have been doing, we opted to play tourist a little bit more. There are a couple new businesses in town and although I’d written preview pieces about both businesses' openinga, I hadn't been inside yet to get a glimpse of the final product. We poked around in those two stores, along with a few other gift shops, then headed out to the lighthouse.

In the end, we decided if you were really, truly a tourist in this town, it wouldn’t be half bad. I guess that's not a surprising conclusion to reach when the skies are blue, the conversation is pleasant, and there's nothing that truly needs to be done except enjoy the warm sun and gentlest of breezes.

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