By Mary Jo
A couple of weeks ago the Wenches got to chatting behind the scenes about what places feel like home, and the answers were interesting. In some cases, home is where we were born and raised even if we're not there anymore. In other cases, it's a place one has moved to and then claimed for oneself. It could be a place you've never lived. Here's what the Wenches have to say:
Andrea/Cara:
I must not be very adventurous at heart, for I’ve lived in New England all my life. (There were a number of years in New York City, but I always felt I had one foot in the country, as it’s only a hop, skip and jump to the Connecticut border.) Or maybe it’s just I that I feel a great affinity to the stark and simple beauty of the area—the colonial clapboard houses of the old towns, the rugged little harbors, the meandering stone walls, the sense of history around every bend. There’s a quiet, reserved air to this part of the country—a good vibe for an introvert like me.
New Englanders are a pretty taciturn lot, perhaps a vestige of the area’s Puritan heritage, but they are also observant, and given to introspection—think Henry David Thoreau and Emily Dickenson. I feel at home here, despite having traveled all over the world. I love the stubborn sense of place, the old-school traditions, the independent spirit. And I love the changing seasons—especially a New England fall, with its bright blaze of colors and crisp apple-scented air.
However, I do wonder at times whether we have some sort of inherited memory of place because the other place that sings to my soul is Switzerland, which is where my mother was born. I love its alpine valleys, glimmering lakes and craggy mountains. I sometimes fantasize about having a rustic wood chalet set high in a steep pasture as a writing retreat. The larder with be filled with local Gruyere and Emmenthaler cheeses. And Swiss chocolate. (Hmm, maybe I’m not going home to New England after all!)
Nicola:
My “home of my heart” is definitely the north of England. I take pride in the fact that I was born in Yorkshire even though I only lived there for the first 18 years of my life and have lived far longer in the south of the country. In fact I see myself as an exile which implies that one day I might go back, and I always define myself as northern in some vague way.Identity is very complicated, I think. For me it’s not just about being a Yorkshire Girl but is broader than that. I feel much more affinity to the whole of the North and love visiting places like Scotland, Northumberland and Cumbria. There’s something about the wild spirit of these places that appeals more than the tame south.
That said, I’ve been to other parts of England and felt a very strong pull to them even when they were previously unknown to me. I write about time travel and reincarnation, and sometimes I feel a place is so familiar I do wonder whether I have lived there in a past life. That happened to me when I visited the county of Suffolk for the first time. It was completely new to me and yet it felt as though I knew it so well. Later I discovered that my mother’s family came from the area hundreds of years ago. Perhaps there is a memory of that sort of connection inside us all.
I’ve been lucky enough to travel all over the world and I’ve seen some wonderful places. I love exploring them and getting to know their history and culture, yet I only really feel rooted in Britain. My husband, on the other hand, moved about so much as a child that he sees his home of the heart as wherever we are settled at the time. It’s more moveable than mine!
Pat:
As a sun lover, I’ve spent my life attempting to find a place in the sun—or pretend I was in one. When I was just a kid, I formed a Beach Boy fan club and played their albums for years and years because they created the fantasy I wanted to live of sun, sun, sun. As an adult, all our vacations were aimed at seeking the sunniest places for whatever time of year it was. Once our kids took off on their own—to places like Florida, California, and the Philippines because they inherited my craving for sun—we were free to plan our own escape.
After all those years of traveling from one sunny clime to another, we knew exactly which one we wanted when it came time for my husband to retire—California. It wasn’t just that the grandkid was there, although that sealed the deal, but it never gets so hot and humid that IT Guy can’t tolerate it. We love to garden, and we can grow anything here—including tomatoes all winter long! And where we live not only has beautiful beaches we can walk every day, but we’re surrounded by people who care about the same things as we do. It’s hard to describe how we can feel so at home in a place so foreign from where we’ve lived, but we’re home now, and we’re not going anywhere else.
Joanna here:
I’m lucky enough to live in the home of my heart. For many years I traveled all over the world, settled in big gray cities, tropical sea sides, and blindingly bright deserts. Never really comfy.
Now I live in the middle Appalachians. I didn’t grow up in this place, but if you go back a few generations, some of my people come from here. That might be why it feels “right.” My house is deep in the woods of a National Park, high in the hills, eight miles from the nearest little town. Nothing here but green growing stuff and the change of seasons and quiet.
And ... y’know ... the kind of crazy neighbors you’d expect to live in the woods.
What’s most homelike?
Sunrise out my eastern window.
The sun slides up over the mountains. Under its belly, folds of dark green and black fill up with orange, minute by minute.
This time of year there’s usually cloud cover hundreds of feet below me, stretched out over the valley. The tips of the hills stick out of a flat white sea of cloud like islands, like peninsulas, like other lands, like something you 'd need to get into a magical boat to visit.
Sunrise takes ten or fifteen minutes and every second of it is different. I could never get tired of it.
Home of my heart, definitely.
Susanna:
The home of my heart is a moveable concept.
Quite literally.
My father’s engineering work continually brought him, and our family, new projects and opportunities, and by the time I graduated high school I’d moved house eight times, and had lived in three countries on two different continents.
Not that I complained. As the second-born child, I was used to just going along and adapting to whatever my family was doing, and I still had my parents and built-in best friend of a sister no matter where we ended up, so I was happy. I learned early on that, of my other friends, the ones who truly mattered stayed around, the ones who didn’t fell away, and there were always new adventures to be had.
The fixed point for me in those years was the city of Brantford, Ontario, where I’d been born. I didn’t live there long myself—briefly as a baby, and again in my last year of high school, in my first apartment, on my own—but all my grandparents lived there, as did my great-grandmother, various great aunts and uncles, and too many cousins to count. Some still do.
No matter where we were living, Brantford was always there, reassuringly solid and the same, and selling the last of my grandparents’ houses was a hundred times harder than I’d thought it would be.
But home is a thing that I carry in pieces—the flashing red light at the end of the long rural road that we watched for together as children, that told us we’d nearly arrived in Port Elgin, the town where I spent the most years as a small child, and where I returned as an adult to waitress and write my first novels.
The sound of the wind in the pine trees that stood at the window of my childhood bedroom in that same small town, and the cooling calm waves of Lake Huron that, no matter how deeply I waded into it, pushed me back gently to shore.
The home of my childhood heart, certainly. But there are other pieces that I carry with me, too, like bits of shells and pebbles tucked to treasure in my pocket.
Memories of the winter light across the hills in South Korea. “My” bench, by Westminster pier, in London, when the lights are coming on along the Thames. And Chinon. Always Chinon.
Maybe my heart has too many homes. Maybe I haven’t yet found the one that it can settle in. And maybe that’s why my stories all seem to be trying to answer the question of what home is, and where my characters truly belong.
Anne:
I spent most of my childhood on the move, going where my father's job took us, sometimes overseas. Most of the places were beautiful — the world is a beautiful place — but the landscape that imprinted itself most strongly on my heart is the area we lived in until I was seven. It's about half way between Melbourne and Sydney, near the border of New South Wales and Victoria, in the foothills of the Great Dividing Range. It's grazing land, cleared for sheep, and those bare brown hills with their rocky outcrops and ragged crown of eucalypts sing "home" to me every time. I remember sitting in the car, driving in to town (a trip of about 15 miles) and finding shapes in the silhouetted trees. I still do it now, when I drive through that country, going from Melbourne to Sydney.
But it's not all bare and brown and dusty. When you go a little way into the hills and the valleys, you'll find crystal clear streams burbling over smooth stones, and you're surrounded by lush greenery — it's cool temperate rainforest, with tall eucalypts, tangled vines and masses of ferns, from leggy, elegant tree ferns to delicate maidenhair nestling on the riverbanks. I used to make little "gardens" in a saucer from those tiny ferns and pretty stones — of course they never took, but I was only 5 or 6, so what did I know? And the smell, fresh and clean and glorious -- the breath of life. We'd have barbecues and picnics beside those streams, with Dad building a makeshift fireplace of river stones, while we kids collected fallen branches for the fire. We drank straight from the stream, the water clear and pure and cold.
This area, with its contrasts and memories, is the home of my heart. There is a poem, well known in Australia, where one of the lines is: "I love a sunburnt country" and for me it rings very true. The poet, Dorothea McKellar, was living in England and, homesick, she wrote it as a love-letter to Australia. It still rings true for me, and many other Australians. It's here, if you want to read it.
https://www.dorotheamackellar.com.au/archive/mycountry.htm
Susan weighs in:
Even with decades spent in Maryland (a very nice place to live, and likely where my family and I will always be), I still feel very attached to Upstate New York, particularly the area where I was born--a small town a few miles from Lake George in the Adirondacks.
We lived there until I was a teenager, when Dad sold his company (he was an engineer and his family company built many major roads in that area), and we moved to what seemed, to us Yankees, the Deep South. Growing up in a place of mountains and lakes, deliciously fresh and non-humid air, long and snowy winters, warm summers with cool evenings, and surrounded not only by the beauty of the landscape but fascinating history formed me in ways that will never change (I still haven't acclimated to Maryland humidity!).
In summer, my parents took my sisters and I up to the lake often, where my grandparents kept a cabin, a dock, and a boat, and we went swimming and fishing. In winter, we skated on frozen ponds and went skiing, and the yard was always populated with snow people. We walked to school, rode bikes to the corner store, walked to our grandmother's house to bake cookies and speak a little French (she was). We visited family in Upstate NY as well as Vermont and even Canada... the freedom, the fun, the beauty of that clean, gorgeous environment, the history that captivated me, the happiness of those years helped shape me. This Marylander will always be part Upstater.
Just a few miles from where we lived was Fort William Henry, at the southern end of Lake George--many of you may know it as the fort in "Last of the Mohicans." We all knew about the massacre that happened there...though the site is now a strip of motels and Indian-themed log cabin shops, where you can buy maple candy and moccasins. As a kid, I loved visiting the fort to gawk at Colonial skeletons in an archaeological pit, and I loved the wax figures acting out daily activities in various rooms in the fort, including the dungeon (oh, Hawkeye!). History was everywhere, and fascinating, and that immersion inspired my love of history.
I go back now and then to the lake, and all the happiness and contentment of those early years comes back, tinted with nostalgia. Other families own the homes we had, and many loved ones are gone now. But the pull of the place is still very strong for me. And next time I go back, I'll buy maple sugar candy and a pair of sandals with moccasin beading, and sit and gaze at one of the most beautiful and cleanest lakes in our country, and feel grateful and privileged that I once belonged there, and feel part of it still.
Mary Jo here:
I'm loving all these meditations on home, and find much to agree with. Like Susan, I was born and raised in Upstate New York but in the far west of the state, in the rolling farmland between Lakes Erie and Ontario.(Photo at left of Letchworth Park, near where I grew up, Wikipedia by Daniel Christensen.)
It was eight hours and a world apart from New York City. After college (six years in Syracuse, which is Central New York,) bought a one way ticket to San Francisco and headed west with my design portfolio in hand. I spent a couple of years in Northern California, a couple more in Southern California, then more than two years in Oxford, England.
When I returned to the US, I stayed with my brother's family in Northern Virginia and looked for work, landing a job in Baltimore, Maryland. Inertia took over <G> and I've lived in Maryland ever since--I've spend more than half my life here. I love Maryland. It has variety, history, texture, and great people. I have no intention of leaving.
I haven't actually lived anywhere other than the places I've mentioned, but I've traveled widely and as Anne says, it's a beautiful world, from the Upper Amazon to the wild islands of the North Atlantic to the deliciously civilized city of Melbourne. I've found much to love everywhere I've lived, and just about everywhere I've visited.
Yet nothing says "home" to me as much as those hills and characteristic small towns of Western New York. When I visit, there's a resonance unlike what I feel anywhere else. My family roots are there, several generations worth of farmers who loved the land. I don't feel like an exile who might some day return--yet that part of the world is part of me, and always will be.
The concept of home is an integral theme in many romances--certainly it is in mine. (My book Silk and Shadows ended with the words, "Welcome home, wanderer. Welcome home.")
Do you have a home of the heart you'd like to tell us about? We'd all love to know!
Mary Jo