It happened yesterday. It was probably just past 11:00 in the morning.
I guess it was inevitable. Or was it?
Maybe it was because our friends had been staying with us for a few days. But yesterday morning Dave & Vi were setting off on a short road-trip. They’d be back in a few days.
We’d be staying. They’d be going.
It was raining as they left. The courtyard garden smelled clean like rain and rock and green.
Maybe it was a little later? I went outside to pick some more fresh thyme to add to the big pot simmering on the stove. Maybe it was coming in from the contrast of the fresh wet air to the cozy aroma of the beginnings of chicken stock.
Then again, I’m almost sure I was standing at the sink when it happened. It was probably the scrubby-good smell of the dishsoap, a smell I forever associate with my mother and the spotless smell of my childhood, but whether it was because we were the ones left to keep the home fires burning, or because of the associative smells of comfort food and cleanliness, I swear I heard the thought in my head as soon as it popped into my brain. I almost saw the words more than heard them.
And I knew it was true as soon as I noticed it, “It’s nice to be staying at home on a day like this.”
Home. I used the word home.
I have always maintained that home is wherever I am with Kevin, but part of me believed that it also required our ‘stuff’ that made up our safe and comfortable world, whether in Vancouver or Sechelt. Of course, I know it is other things too; love, friends, community, routine, neighbourhood, food, comfort, safety…
I have sometimes joked that I feel at home in the world. But lately, I realize it truly is possible; to be home, wherever I am. Yes, I miss my friends and language (and on a really shallow level, I’d love to have some more of my clothes).
Yet. We live here right now. We’re not really on a holiday, so much as just living our lives, albeit in a different country and with some damned fine food.
I’m curious. What makes a home for you?
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Heartwarming article Colleen…the key word being “heart”. To me home is where my heart is, which means being with my husband Rick, whether in our cozy condo (where we love our routines) or somewhere in the world for six months of every year (where we relish the lack of routine). Home is also our annual visits with our 5 sons and their families – in succession – since they live right across Canada. What a fabulously gifted lives we live in Canada, to have such wonderful homes, and for those of us with wanderlust, to be able to experience homes abroad.
Thanks Irene. Yes, we are blessed to be out and about, and in and at home. I am so grateful every day for the incredible choices and lives we are being graced with. I didn’t know you two had 5 sons! That adds a whole other level of visiting and travel. Such lovely layers. It’s like we’re living in a great big multi-layered cake!
Hi Again Colleen. When you responded to Lori about creating the mountains etc. Therein lies the key for me. One’s life perception does not have to come always from the ‘outside in’ but rather from the ‘inside’ out. For me it’s a balancing act with emphasis on the latter. So the most profound home feelings arrive I guess when the two meet. I wonder what the gypsies would think?
Hi again yourself Judy. I love that idea of life’s perceptive balancing act, that perfect estuary where the river meets the ocean and everything has a chance to thrive. I think the gypsies, with my romantic notion of those wooden caravans, probably get this concept best of it all…a cozy velvet home on WHEELS 🙂 Inside most definitely meeting the outside with every revolution.
Fun reading all the comments and your very insightful and responsive responses. Kinda like the Anne Landers of Travel! But you are a better writer.
Don’t make me blush Judy. Though I will agree that I am doing one thing better than Anne Landers…I’m still breathing!
But yes, the comments are wonderful. I enjoy the different takes on this subject. It’s very cool to be able to consider all these great perspectives.
We’ve lived in the same house for 43 years, renovated twice and I’m very familiar with the house and garden, so it’s definitely home. However, if we’re on a golf holiday in Phoenix, Tucson, or the Okanagan, that’s also home. If I can put on my slippers, cook my own dinner and make a pot of soup, then I’m home.
Martha, Is that the Three-S’s of How-To-Make-A-Home? Slippers, Soup and Supper 🙂 As long as the slippers don’t end up in the soup, it should be good.
43-years is a goodly long time to make anywhere feel homey…such a wonderful sense of history and comfort in that, eh?
Especially coming home to the international terminal of YVR… I feel the exact same way and I sometimes do point things out to visitors or start a conversation just so I can talk about how stunning it is here! I’m like a proud mama bragging about her children. 🙂
I’ll let you know when the CBC interview airs. It was really long, so that part of it might easily be cut out, but my response was that home is wherever I am that I feel comfortable and alive and connected. On deeper thought, however, I just don’t think that’s true.
I’m glad you get my unexpected conclusion!
Hey Lori, when your CBC interview airs, please be sure to post it to my Facebook Wall at: https://www.facebook.com/ColleenFriesen.Writer. It’d be great to share.
And yes, I’ve been known to accost strangers holding maps on Vancouver streets so that I can point them in the right direction. I’m always disappointed if someone else has beaten me to it.
Great question, and one I was just asked on a CBC radio interview! Now that I’ve had time to think about it, I have quite a different answer. 🙂 The question was in reference to a quote I used in my book, ending with, “Your body is your location – when you dance, you are profoundly engaged in being there.” So, as a frequent traveller, what does that mean? Where is your “location”? Where is home?
At first thought, home is wherever I am connected to my self, whether that’s a physical place or not. But the more I think about it, no matter how much I feel at home somewhere, that doesn’t make it home for me. Home is here on west coast of B.C., where my family is, where I grew up, where I dance and have close relationships with the community, where I choose to live in between trips. This is HOME and the rest of the world, even in places that I feel connected to, are places that I can see myself making life, but I don’t. I make a life here. At home.
A totally unexpected conclusion.
Hey Lori, I’d be curious to know what your answer was on CBC 🙂
It’s funny, but every time someone gives another answer, I can see myself following their line of thinking, and deciding, yeh, yeh, that’s it.
And yet, that being said, it is your answer that resonates the deepest for me…ultimately, it is the West Coast (at least so far) that is my ultimate true meaning of home.
I love everywhere I travel, but when I land in that Vancouver airport, I feel like I am personally responsible for creating the mountains, the sea and the gorgeousness of everything. I see people pointing and I want to say, “Yeah, I know, this is where I LIVE!”
So thanks for this Lori. I like your totally unexpected conclusion. It works.
Home is where the heart is but sometimes you can get disconnected. France was home to me when I lived with my parents and had family connections. You can live in familiar surrounding where your things are and call it home. I can empathise with the traveller who felt like a snail being pulled off a rock before travelling. You can get very attached to a place because it represents security and familiar surroundings. I can also call home a place or a landscape which”speaks” to me, in which you feel comfortable, like a “déjà vu”.
Nice to see you are enjoying the delicious French cuisine !
Hi Catherine, we are indeed enjoying the French cuisine. It’s sure hard to get any bad food around here.
I wonder if it’s possible to make a home anywhere, or if there are places where it just never feels right?
I feel the same way as you do about some landscapes, sometimes there is some geography that connects. Perhaps ome ancestral DNA kicks in 🙂
All good points!
I have moved a few times and when I do,
feel excited and anxious until I put my owm
personal touches into my new home.
A home to me is where you create a safe haven
to relax in at the end of a hard day!
I am considering moving again and this question
has been at the forefront for me daily:
Firstly, what am I doing?!
As I have created a beautiful haven,
And what can I do to create a new beautiful nest?
Laurie, I think every move is a combination of trepidation and excitement. But each time we leave behind a beautiful nest, it is with the confidence and knowledge that we’ve done it before, and we will certainly do it again.
You will build something new and wonderful, with a little nod to past creations and with a fresh loveliness from incorporating whatever new world you find yourself in. Hope it’s somewhere fabulous for you!
Loved this post.
Home for me really is anywhere in the world I feel comfortable in. I felt at home in NYC, LA, Bali, Germany and my most favorite place in the world the South of France, Saint Tropez. I guess it all has to do with memories and special experiences. I basically grew up in Fance during the summers and LA and NY presented some of the best adventures I had in my life. As long as I am having a great time, I am at home. 🙂
Thanks for your comment Anne-Sophie, I’ve only visited St. Tropez briefly, in fact, I think we just drove through on the way to somewhere else…but now I want to go spend some time there! Any suggestions on anything about where to eat, stay, play, would be welcomed 🙂
I think you’re right about memories and special experiences and I love your last summation, “…as long as I am having a great time, I am at home.” Lovely plan!
I am so much of a homebody – I’ve lived in one town and only three different houses for my entire life. Besides the obvious need for family and friends, to feel truly at home I know I need familiar surroundings – my “stuff” is pretty important to me. And I need to have some history with a place, I think, to have spent enough time there to have lived life in it.
Becca, love your comment and the idea of having a history with a place. I feel that way about our little cottage in Sechelt. There are so many memories in every corner and piece of wall, especially because Kevin and I have pretty much renovated every square inch of it. I think that brings us back to the idea that we love whatever/whomever/wherever we invest our time, heart and sweat; whether a home, children or pet!
Funny thing Colleen, I’ve heard those same words. We have RV’ed around Canada extensively 4 times in 9 years and anywhere we stop where I feel comfortable and safe, is home as long as we have our cozy RV and each other. For 4 months every 2 years, home is on 4 wheels but as excited as I get to leave,about 2 weeks before we get home to Powell River I am equally excited to be going “home.” Even tho home is a simple mobile home in a park, nothing fancy, it’s the best place on earth. Could it be because everything that is familiar is there? I love my simple home but oh my, I love being at home on the road too.
Hey Barb, I like the sounds of your RV lifestyle. Some of my best memories are when Kevin and I first quit work and took our rusty-coloured VW down the Pacific Coast and through Mexico. It was the perfect home for over two months and when we got back to our 3800 square foot house in Mission, I was stunned by the magnitude and wasted space and all the extraneous stuff. I think that was the beginning of the end for that house!
It wasn’t long after that trip that we moved to a 625 sq ft house in Sechelt :). Needless to say, that was an adjustment!
But that place felt like home the second I set foot in it. Endless additions and renovations and paint later, it still makes me happy every time I walk in the door. So what’s that all about?
I read a quote from another travel writer once where he said that he loved being out in the world but he felt like a snail being pulled off a rock just before he left home. He loved his home. AND. He loved traveling. It’s wonderful that it doesn’t have to a be an either, or, decision. We’re so lucky to have the option and choice to do both. Sounds like you’ve figured that out!
Habitual tasks are a major part of what makes me feel at home. It can be unpacking a bag into a hotel wardrobe, scrubbing the toilet or filling the dinner pot with water from the stream beside my tent. With out this “dominance” of space I tend to feel a guest, less comfortable, less in control. Family, friends and the nearby coffee shop are not much different. People and places that are familiar increase confidence in the “space”, less things unknown- more knowledge/support more comfortable, more control.
Our lives are a series of routines that only increase in “emulsification” with age and we can blend them up with diversions of holiday, vacation -career change or altered life plans but when the power goes out everything settles a similar recipe of habitual routines that make us who we are and keep us alive because we know no different.
Cory, I do believe you’ve nailed it with, “People and places that are familiar increase confidence in the “space”.
I think that’s it; we overlay our sense of dominance/control on a space by investing something of ourselves in it, whether through tasks and routine or friends and family, all of which creates a sense of connection aka Home.
And being the queen of all things concerning salad, I can heartily agree with the emulsification factor of life 🙂 Pretty hard to separate that oil and vinegar once it’s all blended together, but we can sure give it a try!
From my experience of living in Greece I relate to what you say. I actully feel so much at home there (even when I’m just visiting now) that I do consider it to my ‘other’ home. I feel at home pretty well everywhere I go and always find it hard to leave. Yes, home is where you heart is. That’s true. (and I never get as homesick for my ‘real’ home as I do for the one I had in Greece.
Ruth. I have only been to Greece for a short visit (for a week or so, about a dozen years ago) but it’s a place that’s high on my list. I wonder if part of what makes it such a connection for you is the incredible knowledge you’ve acquired about its history, myths, landscapes and of course, the sheer volume of time you’ve spent there. I would think that must deepen the connection even more.
Great article Colleen. You look like everyone’s dream of the ‘beautiful people! Happy is so good and uplifting to see.
Home for me requires familiar surroundings (have been there for about 3 days at least). Also always need to find ‘my person’ nearby ie coffee shop or neighbourhood. A like soul with whom to connect even if only for valuable fleeting moments. It’s really great on those rare occasions when a new friendship actually buds and grows. Hey, hold onto the thought about the world and oyster. You are one of the few of us who holds the key. Hi to Kevin. Looking good as well
Hey Judy, we are definitely living the dream (though some people might not think that today’s events of doing laundry, cleaning the toilet and writing a blog counts as a dream day:)
Like you, I need to find the local place that I can call my own. That’s the one disappointment here, the town is too small for a regular coffee shop hangout. However, we are compensating for that setback by eating some of the freshest, organic, loveliest food EVER!
BTW, I do believe you are another keyholder…