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Monthly Archive for August, 2009

“Home Sweet Home” by Audrey at L’air du Temp

Published on August 31, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 15 Comments Tags: , , .

I’ve wondered how best to introduce you, dear reader, to my issues concerning ‘home sweet home.’ I have been enriched by all the posts by La Belette Rouge and her guest bloggers on the idea of home. This is a subject that is very dear to my heart. I suppose it is because I have never really felt a sense of home. I came close, two times; it was when I lived alone. I wonder if that might tell me something. It was there in that alone space that I felt safe and I could unfurl my wings and be as splendid as I wanted to be, or as quiet as a butterfly, as I fluttered around my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, barefoot and moving to my own rhythm without the expectations, judgment, or criticism of another.

La Belette Rouge wrote that our first home is in our mother’s womb. Oh dear, …this makes sense to me. And if it is true, it is the beginning of an understanding that I have longed for in my ‘sense of homelessness’ and insecurity. You see, my mother and father married when they were only 18 years old. My mother became pregnant right away with her first born, and like stair steps, 3 other children followed. After a physically abusive relationship (family lore still wonders of the two, which one was most abused, as they were quite even in their knock down drag outs) my mom left my dad when I was six months old and moved all of us to New York City, leaving all that was home and family in the south. My mom was a single mom with four children finding a way to live in NYC. I can only imagine how difficult that must have been for a twenty something young woman alone. Add to that, a broken heart. She made it work, we survived, and for this I am deeply grateful. We always, thankfully had a home, a three bedroom apartment in Brooklyn, nicely furnished and clean. We had safety and food, the necessities. Or was it? In my humble opinion, I feel as if I missed out on a kind of loving tenderness and attention from my mother and absent father. Comforting friends want me to understand that my mom had no time for this, what with working and supporting four children alone. Maybe not, but I needed it.

I’ve had my issues of depression, sadness, ‘lostness,’ and insecurity. In my mother’s eyes I was stupid and ugly, and she said so. And I believed her. For some reason I have no idea why, I did not live my life as if I believed her. Maybe I was trying to prove otherwise. I was always at the top of my class in school, class president & captain of the girl’s basketball team. After working my way through university, undergraduate and graduate school, I began a career in business and I did some modeling on the side to indulge my love of fashion. However, whatever accomplishments I achieved, she dismissed them as meaningless.

I thought parents are supposed to usher their children onto a ‘higher plane’ in life, to help them to grow and fly in unimaginable ways. Though, perhaps, as her wings were clipped by such a terrible beginning into adulthood, she did not want me to fly either.

In spite of the history of my family and difficult home life, I have managed to carve out a love for life, and I do love moving about NYC with all the cultural, intellectual and entertaining goodies it has to offer. But I always feel a sense of loneliness and ‘homelessness.’ Though we always had a home, there in that space, a love and affection and tenderness was sorely missing. And I needed it. I needed it like a plant needs water. And I suppose as one guest blogger wrote, I feel like a fish out of water always. And with that I am missing a confidence and security, a well being and sense of belonging that many of you have written about. I read your writings and I relish in them, gaining a vision and a reminder of how sweet home can be. I feel a sense of… ‘ahhhh,’ so that is what it’s like to feel at home.’

And too, many of you have fed my understanding by letting me know that home is not always that cozy little place where we grow our wings in the midst of love and comfort, so that one day we can jump off… and fly… ideally soar! Some of us are constantly mending and tending to our hurts so that we can jump, hop, crawl to the next place. As well, some of us have had ideal homes and have run into bumps in the road, rejection, separation, and loss and are trying to figure out how to be well again, and are doing it.

We all have our blessings and our challenges, and thankfully this is not a hurt or pleasure contest. Just a space in time where we hope to enjoy life as best we can, steeped in happiness when joy abides, and too, finding our way out of pain and sadness, when it comes our way. We do our best.

I haven’t given up on finding ‘home sweet home.’ I dream of a house, a home with cushy cream colored sofas in the middle of a book lined living room. A kitchen that looks out onto a garden, there at the kitchen table, where I have my morning tea and can write stories that I hope interest, heal and inspire. Upstairs in my bedroom, where my husband rests after a long and arduous week at work is a big cushy comfortable bed, large bay windows while the sun streams in on our antique bureaus. And a baby, … maybe. Not sure what nature will say as time is ticking. But the dream still lives on. And I hope to get past whatever blocks me so that I can find my way to home, where things are pretty and peaceful and comforting.

In the meantime, I have found:

* A love and honor of friendship (as I have adopted friends as family)
* The freedom to travel and explore (due to not having ties at home)
* A sensitivity to the plights and pains of others (a kind of wounded healer, I hope)
* A love/adoration for reading and exploring (they have been my saving grace)
* Over wine, (preferably red wine in Spain (where I lived four 5 years trying to find myself … France will do too) spending time with friends where laughter and love abounds. I am always grateful for loving moments. And someday I hope to get past what blocks me and transform this loving energy into a loving ‘physical’ home.

Wish me luck!
*****************
Audrey is the author of the exquisitely beautiful and lushly dreamy blog, L’Air du Temp. She now works in publishing as an assistant editor and her aspirations are to be a published writer.

“If you talk with me for more than a few minutes” by Kirie

Published on August 29, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 8 Comments Tags: , , .

If you talk with me for more than a few minutes, you’ll probably find out that I live on an island. I think I let it be a defining fact for me because I’ve always felt a little like an island myself, sort of separate, disconnected. When we moved here five years ago, it was as though that feeling manifested itself in geography. And in doing so, it suddenly felt okay for me to just, well—be. It was a coming home of sorts.

Of course, I’ve been informed that I will never be a real islander—that elite title being reserved for those whose generations have been born here. Nonetheless, I’ve become as possessive as the old-timers, calling it “our island,” or “our little island.”

The island itself is a few miles long, and it sits in the middle of a bay. The southernmost end broaches the Atlantic, and the rocky shoreline there constantly churns turquoise and cobalt waves. It is one of my favorite spots in the world. Sometimes, when the tide is out, my husband and I spend an afternoon climbing on the slippery granite outcroppings. When we find a sheltered spot, I love to doze in the sun, and feel cradled by the stones underneath me.

Our house on the island is far from the beaches, but at night I can hear the steady sounding of the foghorns, and I often wake to mists rolling up the street from the ocean. These are small but intense pleasures, and it is this sort of thing that makes me lay claim to this place.

Our house itself is a claim on the island, too. We bought an old cape cod style house and renovated it completely; it is no longer recognizable as the house it had been years ago. But to look at now, it is to see one element of who we are as a family.

The process of building the house was pivotal—we literally made a home here, and it feels like that makes a difference for me.

Because we were going to completely gut the cape, we rented a house in a nearby town. Two months into the project, we experienced the type of renovating nightmare you hear about, and found ourselves the prey of an unethical contractor. I spent many, many days in tears as my husband and I searched for a solution, and hoped desperately we would be able to have someplace to move us when our lease was up on the rental.

In the end, we cut our losses and fired the guy just after he finished the initial framing. With only the outside walls of our house standing, I took over as the general contractor on our home. Building it became literally a labor of love, and I feel connected to this house in a way I never have with other homes. I relish knowing the bones of this place. I can see the walls with a sort of x-ray vision, which ones have the main plumbing lines, where the power laces up from the basement, which outlets are on which circuit. While the walls were all open and the floors incomplete, I would climb ladder to ladder, then scale the brick chimney to the attic rafters. From my perch, I could see the house as a cutaway from roof to basement. I felt acutely aware that I was seeing a side of the house that she wouldn’t show for long, and I was one of the only ones to ever see it. It was like a little secret whispered between us.

I got to know the house so well that I would walk around it in my dreams at night, noticing what piece of furniture would look better here or there, imagining what the light would be like in a room painted blue, or yellow, or red. Long before we had wiring or drywall, floors, cabinets, or fixtures, our home was alive in my mind, tangible, full of life and sounds. Those dreams from those months were as incredible and strengthening, as our days were long and enervating with managing the project. In the end, much of what I had dreamed about made sense in the waking day.

As a younger woman, I longed to have deep roots in a single place. But life has brought me unexpectedly to many places in the world. Finding a few whispered secrets of each place has helped me create a sense of home in each of them. In Belgium, these secrets came to me from the hiss of the radiator, the open skylights in our ceiling, music wafting from across the courtyard as our neighbor played mandolin on Tuesday nights. In Maryland it was the snow of pink cherry blossoms in April, and the scent of the woodsmoke from our stone fireplace. In Chicago, it was the silvery flood of light that reflected off the building across the street, the thump of the elevator down the hall, the thrum of traffic that started at 4 am. I’d notice these things and suddenly something inside me would resonate to the frequency of home.

I’d like to think that that feeling of home could be portable, something I can carry with me wherever I go because it is solidly within me now in all these accumulated memories. But I probably sound so blithe about it because of my current, more-or-less settled vantage point.

I can’t rule out the possibility of moving to someplace completely new, and starting over again. It has happened several times before. So as rooted as I feel on this island, in our hand-built nest, I fight complacency. I remind myself that in the transition points, I was heartsick and longing for control and that sense of a cradled haven. I remind myself to be present, and to be grateful for it. It is a tenuous thing, that sense of comfort, and so I nurture it while I can, and I actively seek out the secrets in the animated and daily facts of our home now.

Here are a few that I’ll share with you:

  • The northern windows in the study catch the best breeze on a crisp
    fall day, but only if you open a south window in the kitchen.
  • There is a particular light that cuts across favorite corner in our bedroom and tells me it is 3:30 pm.
  • When it is very cold, you can warm your feet by standing in front of the floor vent by the stovetop—on these days I find myself whipping up batches of pudding or caramel or something that needs constant stirring.
  • In the early morning, the swish of a pump on the north side of the house tells me that Ada is up and brushing her teeth.
  • The blueberry bushes in our yard will peak each summer during the last week of July, and we make haste to pick them each morning before the birds and squirrels get their ration. By mid August, they are simply green shrubs again.
  • In my studio, the light is best for painting in late afternoon, when the sun comes through the leaves and puddles golden on the ash floor.

These little things and a thousand more recreate that sense of home again and again for me. Noticing them is like saying a mantra.

Sometimes I think of the families who used to live in the old cape that was here. Perhaps a now-grown child may drive down our street to see his old house and find ours it its place. I can only imagine his disappointment and confusion. I’m saddened to think my dreams stole something from someone else’s memories. When these thoughts come to me, I feel a twinge of remorse, and then I move into the present. I try to do something immediate and intimate with our daughters, to make their own memories here—maybe a shell-finding walk on the beach, or a trip out to the garden, maybe I’ll read a story to them on the sun-dappled couch, or sing with them on the piano. These are the little memories I hope to build with them. Because that is where that sense of home and comfort will start. And perhaps, in the wide world, they will see and experience things that help them pluck that string of memory that resonates home for each of them.

**********************

Kirie lives on her island in the Northeast US, along with her husband, two daughters, and the menagerie of cats, snails, and a friendly Himalayan rabbit.

She says:

“Until my oldest daughter came home, I did lots of things professionally, from working in publishing to teaching Rhetoric at various colleges, including the US Naval Academy. Currently, though, I’m not “working outside the home.” Like many people, I sometimes find it’s hard to put too fine a point on what I do. I suppose you could sum it up by saying I like to make stuff: I make art, I make connections, sometimes I make a mess, I make order from chaos, I make myself laugh. Mostly, I try to make the most out of life. It’s corny, and true. And it’s probably pretty close to what most people do…”

Kirie’s thoughtspace in public is the blog she keeps: 3 Little Chickies

“Interior Design” Poems by Hannah Stephenson

Published on August 28, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 12 Comments Tags: , .

I. The Garage

Dusty, wasp-infested, the garage is a shrine
To both potential and paralysis. Here lie
The tools to correct a house’s every woe.
Red-handled screwdrivers sprout in a row,
Strident as tulips; hammers hang from
The neck, in profile. Clippers gawk, wide-eyed,
And wrenches yawn with metal gums.
The dull teeth of a saw and fossilized nails
Lie slack-jawed on a stack of plywood.
The car rests here in winter, to be shielded from
Snow, but other than that, we avoid the garage.
We avoid the garage, except to dump some
Cast-off thing—the baby’s plastic toy sink,
The clammy mop—and here it remains,
Ever-patient. To open the garage, we push up
With all our might. The door whines, we step
Inside, and as the sun glances off of our
Safe belongings, we think, with gratitude,
A-hah, here it is, so this is where I left that.

II. The Plug

Face-first, snug against the base of the wall
The plug sucks electricity, a leech, an eel.
The fridge hums contentedly, fed through
This tail. Sitting on the kitchen floor when
I was young, I put my ear to the refrigerator’s
Flank and listened to the dull buzz inside.
That’s when I learned that every object has
A voice, that the plug is a vein, a vocal cord.



III. Clock : Scale
Numbers press their faces to the glass.
The clock’s digits are placid, unimpressed
By the small hand’s strength, the sweeping caress
Of its taller, more graceful twin. Below, a brass
Pendulum lolls in boredom. One one-thousand,
Two one-thousand: the time it takes for the scale
To contemplate your body. It welcomes the pale n style=";font-family:Times New Roman;font-size:100%;">
Pad of your feet. The numbers flutter like pinned
Moths, atremble under your form, your gaze.
The scale is based on variation and pressure.
You step on, the dial spins. Your
Body exists, the scale is proof. It weighs
On demand. The clock presents a time,
Measures some other world unseen, divine.
———————
Hannah Stephenson is a poet and writer living in Vancouver, BC. She is the Culture Editor (and book reviewer) for GLOSS Magazine, and is a regular contributor to Mankind Magazine. You can visit her daily poetry blog, The Storialist, at www.thestorialist.com.

Photos by Marcos Armstrong. See more of Marcos’s work at www.marcosarmstrong.com and www.marcosarmstrong.blogspot.com.

“Home is not a place” by Schmutzie

Published on August 27, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 17 Comments Tags: , , , .

When I was asked to write on the subject of home, I was taken aback. The topic has long been on my mind, and I have wandered back to it quite a lot lately as I slowly set up my home office and consider the implications of marrying my work to my apartment.

From the first time that I was both conscious and mature enough to acknowledge the existence of a sense of home, I knew that I did not possess it. I found comfort in a certain blanket or a pair of shoes, but I was keenly aware that I did not feel the presence of home in the same way that other people I knew did. A friend in high school once took me on a road trip so that we could visit her grandmother’s abandoned house one last time before it finally collapsed into the ground. She pointed through the windows and told me how she had played on a rug over there and had fresh milk at a table over there. Her eyes were wet with the understanding that she could never go back. I envied her that foothold she had in a space to which she could point.

This, among other things, put the idea in my head that I should look for home. Surely, I must be lost without it, I thought. I imagined that it must be like an extension of the body, a weight to hold you down along the continuum of time and events.

I found a taste of home in moments here and there. It flashed in a passing engagement to a man I later left. I tried on several apartments, a couple of houses, and numerous roommates. I left one religion for another, and then that one for none. Different circles of friends kept my heart and mind warm, but they travelled and moved and went to school and got married into other lives. I wondered if I was destined to drift, to be foreign everywhere.

One day, quite suddenly, so much so that it caused me to inhale sharply, I realized that I was already home. I had lately been chasing down the sense of home in a journal that I’d filled with pages and pages of angst. The journal fell out of my bag and into a puddle late one night, disappearing into black water that lifted the ink of my words out of the page, destroying what I had spent hours and hours writing down. It occurred to me that what was in that book, that piece of home I had been cultivating, was from within my head. It was not in those pages. I had always been home, and that it was, predictably, in the last place I looked for it: the one place that has always been reliably mine, through both good times and bad, was my own mind. As I explored in a previous essay on the topic of home, I had finally figured it out: [My] home is built perpetually inside my head, and… I carry it within me everywhere.

It was a liberating revelation. My attachment of home to place had been misleading, and I realized that for all my apparent wandering, I had not been wandering at all, at least as far as finding my own sense of home was concerned. I had been there the whole time but had overlooked it in favour of a more rigid definition.

I no longer had to look for home in buildings or religions or other people’s bodies, because I finally knew that I was already there. I might externally be a stranger, a state to which I had become accustomed, but internally my home would be with me everywhere always, and I began to learn to come home to myself, one step at a time.
********************
Schmutzie blogs mainly at Schmutzie.com and runs a small fleet of other websites, including Five Star Friday and the Grace in Small Things social network. She is a writer, photographer, and needlecrafter living with her husband and three cats in Regina, Saskatchewan, Canada.

“Home” by Corine at Hidden in France

Published on August 26, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 22 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .

Am I a French woman who lives in America, or am I an American woman, as my passport insists, who happened to spend the first 20 years of her life in France? Could anyone reading this help me sort it out?

If you’ve been an expatriate for long enough, you cease to define yourself by your roots. But of course none of those around you do. No matter how American I feel, to my American friends I am first and foremost ‘Française’. I come with a full package of preconceptions, specters of baguettes, berets, whiff of camembert and doubtful personal hygiene and also– just as puzzling to me– inherent elegance, sex appeal and that dab of ‘je ne sais quoi’. My own son recently wrote an essay on our family and every third word mentioned the fact that his mother is French. But to me, things are clear. Home is where I cook burgers on the barbecue. Home is where I wear flip flops to the grocery store. Home is where Barack Obama is.

In a recent blog post I admitted that the title of my blog Hidden in France might as well be Hidden from France. (Warning: digression: my blog is not a safe place to bitch and moan about the (toxic?) nature of home as my mother might read it. Although she has sworn to never lay eyes again on that heap of garbage again. Probably a good choice: To my defense she reads my posts (or refuses to read them) through an online automatic translator and the result is quite surreal. You get the idea: home is not where maman is– No, home cannot possibly be France. All France equals in my mind, is pathos. As a matter of fact, I have not returned to Paris in the five years since my father died. That’s how detached I am, that’s how grown up.

It is pumped up with American patriotism and sentiments that I find myself bravely boarding a plane for Paris this summer. Paris as a tourist will be wonderful, relaxing and so very exotic.

But just one step on the carpet of the ‘aeroport’ and I have this strange instinct: I’m immediately able to sense things Americans are probably not supposed to sense. For example I know to carefully say ‘bonjour’ and ‘excusez-moi’ before asking for directions to the baggage claim. In the U.S. I would address people with a direct question. Not here, no no, no… And how do I know when we sit in our first café for a drink that the personality and mood of the waiter is to be studied and navigated and that I better fake humility in exchange for decent service? I also know that merci means so much more than thank you here. I’m ashamed to tell you that this American girl, within a day of landing in Paris, has reverted to full-on French. I only wear my least comfortable shoes because they are stylish. I no longer slouch. I use table manners and get all uptight about the way my kid’s elbow flares up when he cuts his meat. I detail people and know they are detailing me. I don’t set a foot inside a store without saying bonjour as I know that the store is really an extension of its owner and I would be terribly rude to come in and ignore that silent rule. This is exhausting. I’m a nervous wreck. But there is some awesome stuff too: For example: I know my foods. At ‘Monoprix’ I reach for products remembering exactly what they taste and feel like. In the bakery I know to bypass the croissants for ‘chouquettes’ and to ask for my baguette ‘pas trop cuite’. Forget well done burgers, I suddenly look at a steak tartare on restaurant menus as delicacy rather than breeding ground for e-coli. And there are little tricks about the system I simply know. I call ‘SOS Médecin’, the service that will send a doctor to my door in less time it takes to have a pizza delivered (and for roughly the same amount). I let steam out by snapping at strangers because it feels great and I know the worst they will do is snap back at me: there are no full-blown Psychos here, only low- grade ones such as myself. And I know how to communicate with strangers in that convoluted way that will ensure that the gruff post office lady will send my package after hour ‘pour moi exceptionellement’. In France I know the people. I know them intrinsically. I know how they feel and how they function. I know their logic, however absurd, as it is also mine. I know their facial expressions and hand movements because they make total sense; so much conveyed with a wink, a blink, a wave of the hand. In the United States, let’s face it, people have no idea why I wink, or blink or wave my hands about. I just look spastic to them. In France I watch the people sitting at terraces of cafés, gesticulating and disagreeing with one another with gusto, and I want to pull up a chair and join in the fun. In the United States, I will always be too opinionated and argumentative for pleasant conversation. Yes, it is clear to me now. I must belong in France, France is the only place where I can be perceived as normal.

The only problem is: French people don’t feel too normal to me anymore. Here I said it. French people feel grotesque! They are ambulatory clichés. The girl in the flowing dress on the bicycle with the baguette in a basket. The woman shopping at the market with the ‘tailleur’ and the strand of pearls. The man with moustache like this is still 1930. The waiter who woke up on the wrong side of the bed and to whom I must apologize for being there. This is all so weird. Am I really like these people? I suddenly see myself as a living-breathing caricature of Frenchness.

Days later I am back in L.A. the very city I glibly put down in so many blog posts, and I take a big breath of relief. Why do I feel so incredibly light suddenly? My eyes literally caress my small possessions, my paintings, my comfy bed, even that horrid couch that should be burned. Outside the house, I want to kiss people for the directness with which they communicate. I love the absence of mind games. I love the low level of drama, the lack of judgment, the sense that people are basically benevolent. I love the fact that waiters keep their moods to themselves. I love the smog and I love wearing flip-flops. It’s so good to be home.

And immediately, I begin missing France again.
************

Corine does not have a last name. Not yet. Not until she feels that her writing is fit to attach a last name to. She writes all day in the hope of her novels being published one day. In the meantime she grudgingly attends to the well being of her family and pets. You can read more on the blog Hidden in France, which is about color, Bohemia, de
sign, writing, neurosis, and of course all things French. Because she was traveling she has not read what the illustrious other bloggers have written here about Home but has already purchased the bottle of Bourgogne with which she plans to drown her insecurity after reading them.

Okay but seriously

Born and raised in Paris

Studied at the Sorbonne

Worked in advertising

Married an American and moved to California

Two boys age 10 and 17, One husband, one cat, one dog, two birds, 8 goldfish

Three novels, two screenplays, countless articles, very little money but living the dream.

“The Search for Home” by Annette Fix

Published on August 25, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

Home. It’s such an elusive, forever shifting concept. Home is more than a dwelling. It’s a sense of place. And a feeling of belonging. And a box that is my personal haven of comfort.

I grew up in a Southern California desert ghetto where the summers averaged 110 degrees and you could smell meth cooking at night. I often joke that the house in which I lived was held together by termites and sand fleas. But when you’re young, home is what is familiar—it’s what you know, it’s where you come from.

In my adult life, I’ve become locally transient—if that makes sense. I’m a serial renter who has moved 20 times in 24 years, criss-crossing four Southern California counties: San Bernardino, Riverside, Los Angeles, and now The OC—Orange County—home of the “Real Housewives,” with the plastic wealth and designer culture to which I can’t even relate. But I came and I stay for the beach.

I’ve found that I feel most at peace when I’m near the ocean. Something about the ebb and flow, the constant cycle of its soothing sound. The feel of the sand, shifting under my bare feet. I also feel the most bliss when I’m warm. I’ve visited cold states and countries and have discovered that cold weather makes me tense and irritable—and only a half step away from homicidal. But I’m still searching to find a place where I truly feel at home. Like the character of Vianne in the book/movie Chocolat, I’m always searching and moving with the wind.

And it’s time to move again. This is a big one. I’m switching coasts. Destination: Miami or Ft. Lauderdale. ETD: mid-December this year. My husband has family in South Florida. He loves the warm water and wants to begin sailing again. Everything I know is here in California, but I’m excited by the new adventure. Excited to see if the high-rise condo on the beach will be home for me. I’ve loved my tropical vacations to places like Cancun and St. Bart, so the move to Florida seems like it will be a natural fit.

In the five years I’ve been married, I’ve stayed in one place and amassed quite a lot of “stuff” that will need to be culled for the cross-country move. I can’t imagine that our ten-foot beige leather sectional will fit into an elevator. (How do you get things like that into a high-rise condo? Certainly not up the stairs!)

Hubby suggested we get rid of our furnishings and start anew. That’s something we’ve not yet agreed upon. Because our styles are so different, it was challenging to find a middle ground when we bought what we have. My husband prefers modern, angular/geometric furniture. I’m earthy eclectic with a touch of romance. He’s minimalist décor. I love knickknacks. He’s square. I’m round.

But when it comes down to it, I’m not really that attached. It’s all expendable. The adventure to find a new home—a home that feels right is more important than packing a 3,000 sq. ft. box of stuff.

***

Annette Fix is the author of The Break-Up Diet: A Memoir “…a fresh, funny, honest, and insightful dish of sex and the single mom.” She’s also a publishing industry speaker and consultant, and a spoken-word storyteller. Annette is happily married to her Danish Prince Charming. She was recently empty-nested by her 20-year-old photographer son, so now she plays Alpha Mom to two adopted fur babies, a Rottweiler/Shepherd and a Labrador/Pit Bull.

“Zimbabwe, my homeland” by Andrea Eames

Published on August 24, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 32 Comments Tags: , , .

Where are you from?” people ask me, puzzled by my hybrid accent.

I tell them I’m Zimbabwean. They may have heard about Zimbabwe on the news, I say.

“Oh yes.” Sometimes they have, sometimes they haven’t. They ask what it was like. I tell them the things they usually want to hear: about the heat, the animals.

“Why did you leave?”

I tell them that we were compelled to, because of the political situation, but that is not quite true. It was a choice. We were not chased out by war vets brandishing axes, not exactly; we were not forced to fly out at midnight, as my aunt and uncle were, carrying their half-asleep children and a suitcase of possessions. Yes, we were told to go, but we did not have to listen. Our country did not want us, but we could have stayed.

We left in 2002. Not only did we leave behind the intangible things (‘home’, that strange and inescapable true north; history; pride): we left behind a rubbish tip of Stuff. All the toys I lost in the garden over the years. The bobby pins I dropped behind the dressing table. Cat hair in the carpet. My mother’s jewellery. The dead bodies of my grandparents, crumbled into ashes at their old church. The treehouse. The rifles and bayonets my stepfather threw down the borehole and concreted over (just in case). The books. The furniture. The cat, the chickens, the lovebirds, the guinea fowl, the whole menagerie that lived with us. The endless memorabilia and detritus of three lives lived in one house. We left fingerprints on the walls and footprints on the wooden floor. The ghosts, however, came with us.

It was a choice. We lived our whole lives with one foot in Somewhere Else – you had to, the way things were going. There was always a back-up plan, a secret stash of money, the whisper of a plane ticket. We always knew we were going to leave. The question was when.

Our home in Harare was known as Fort Knox. It had broken glass on the six-foot fence, burglar bars on all the windows, a rape gate safeguarding the sleeping quarters, padlocks on all the doors.

“When we get burgled,” said my stepfather, not believing it would happen, “then we will go.”

The night came. Smashing glass, a yell, footsteps down the corridor. My stepfather brandishing a cricket bat. Policemen standing around, pretending to write in their notebooks. A perfect dusty footprint in the space where the computer used to be. And we did not go. Our house may have been breached, but our home was still intact.

It did not take a murder to persuade us to leave. It took dozens. Dozens of white farmers, people we knew, who were killed by Mugabe’s regime. We listened to the BBC World Service in darkness (there was always a power cut) when the first farmer died. This is when we realised that things were not going to get better. This was the beginning of months, years, of fear, when rumours and the truth were indistinguishable.

And finally, the flight out.

I find it hard to remember. It happened to someone else, a long, long time ago, back in the time when stories happen.

I lived in Zimbabwe until I was seventeen, visiting my grandparents here in England almost every year. I even lived in England, for a while, when the violence against white farmers was at its height. My parents bought me a plane ticket and bundled me onto an aircraft in the space of twenty-four hours. I spent the months in England calling home, when the phone lines were working; asking my parents how they were. Asking if everyone was safe. Not believing the answers. I did return, but it was only for another two years. We left in 2002, with suitcases stuffed with belongings and foreign currency sewn into our clothes – emigrated to New Zealand, where I live now (I had dysentery when we left, I remember; not ideal for plane travel).

Zimbabwe was colour. Everywhere else is a pale approximation. Everything there was more keenly experienced: the sun melting my skin into sweat, the hot scent of yellow grass, the distant coughing of lions in the night. Do I remember it this way because childhood memories are always more vivid, or because something happened to me when I left? I have a theory. You can never really leave a home – some part of you always stays behind. When I left Zimbabwe, I split in half. One Andrea continues to live there. The other is me. Like conjoined twins that have been separated, the two halves are bound to experience some damage. Whatever I experience now will be half-seen, half-felt.

A couple of years before we left Zimbabwe, Mugabe passed a law compelling everyone with more than one passport to relinquish the non-Zimbabwean one or be declared an illegal alien. We kept our British passports. It was a difficult decision; but we needed to have an escape route. Every night our president appeared on television, telling the country that it was our fault, that we were evil influences that did not belong there any more. We became official foreigners in the country we had lived in for a lifetime. Perhaps because of this, I now feel most at home when I am travelling. I find airports comforting. In an airport, everyone feels like me: rootless, wandering, foreign. I am used to leaving things and people behind, carrying what I can in a single suitcase.

“ "zh-CN" style="font-size:100%;">The strength of a fish is in the water.” I never understood this Shona proverb until I was away from Zimbabwe. For a start, it is a landlocked country, and Harare is the most landlocked city in it, so I did not have much experience of fish. To me, they seemed weak – voiceless, legless, with gulping mouths and beseeching eyes, things that are served up in dubious batter in fish and chip shops, or swim golden in ponds. Things that are left gasping when the water dries up, as it does in the hottest summers. They are imprisoned in the water, limited by it. But your water – your home – is safety as well as a prison. Taken out of it, a lot of your strength vanishes.

I suppose one day I will have to make a home again. I find the prospect frightening, and for now I am content to cobble together some sort of approximation instead. I walk through my house now breathing clean, dry air. The weather is mild, the sky thin and pale. I hardly ever see an ant. Nothing here particularly wants to kill me. My dishes and clothes are cleaned by a machine rather than human hands, and the cat that wraps itself so elegantly around my ankles is not the same prowling, midnight cat who condescended to live with me so many years before. Something leaves me gasping here, and dried out. Something is slowly evaporating. I have tried to capture it, but it slips golden through my fingers and is gone.

I do not think I can go back. I try to imagine flying home, seeing the lion-coloured savannah sprawl out beneath the plane, feeling the wheels touch down on Zimbabwean ground. I can picture the door of the plane opening: heat, too-bright sunshine, the familiar smell of dry grass. One of three things would happen.

  1. The fear would come back. I would crouch somewhere inside the plane and refuse to get off.

  2. I would be arrested (we left under complicated circumstances).

  3. I would run off the plane, take my shoes off, feel the soil under my feet again and never, ever leave.

I don’t know if I will ever go home, or if I want to try. But I suppose we can’t predict the future. Who knows what will change in Zimbabwe, in the years ahead? Maybe one day I will be able to return – not to the country I grew up in, because that no longer exists, but to some new, brighter version of it. And perhaps there will be a place for me there.

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Andrea Eames is a Zimbabwean writer now living in New Zealand. Her book, Ngozi (a Shona word meaning ‘vengeful ghosts’) is being published by Harvill Secker in early 2011. It is based on her childhood in Zimbabwe, living under Mugabe’s regime.
She is now working on a new novel, also set in Zimbabwe, which deals with Shona superstition and magic. In-between working sessions, she drinks dangerously high levels of coffee, obsesses over vintage clothing and attempts to teach her cat how to type.

Her wonderful blog is called A Cat of Impossible Colour which I love for many reasons, including her incredible personal style, talent as a writer, and weasel appreciation. Andrea might be too shy to admit it but it is my hunch that she is an actual weasel/belette, and I don’t say that about just anybody.

“Real/now/past homes” by Kate at Make Do Style

Published on August 21, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 11 Comments Tags: , , , .

My real home is by the seaside. But of course I don’t live where my real home is. I was born and raised by the sea and for years I couldn’t live inland as it made me feel claustrophobic. I’m amazed I live inland now, however the River Thames provides me with a sense of the sea. Water is my favourite thing. I care little for anything else.

I’m quite happy to reside anywhere; I’m a bit similar to a cat. As long as I’ve got food and water, a cosy bed to lie in I’m pretty much done. I’m not sure if this is because I’ve moved about so much, often in the same place. I moved lots due to university and work, although I always owned a property even if I wasn’t living in it. The only thing I regret about moving about is the possession I have either lost or discarded along the way.

My current home is home due to having to relocate very quickly. I actually didn’t give it much thought I just went into operation move mode. Before the sudden announcement by Mr MDS that the Bristol office was shutting and we were offered London, we’d been visiting friends who had moved from Philadelphia to Epsom. When we left I actually uttered the words ‘what a nice place to live’. Four months later we live in the same road as them.

I’m lucky that I’m a city girl at heart as the seaside life I led was always large town or city other than Aberystwyth and Rhodes. Also I had lived and worked in London before after I left university so I felt I was returning, although I don’t think I’d ever really set foot in Surrey before! I love the fact I’m in Oxford Street within 50 minutes of shutting my front door and this includes a cycle ride, train to Waterloo, tube on a rainy day or a lovely walk when it isn’t. But equally on a Saturday morning I can go for a run amongst the woods and deers or we can stroll through Richmond Park. The deer often hang around in our street and we are surrounded by beautiful trees evacuated from Kew Gardens during the Second World War in case of bombing. The space makes up for the lack of water.

My old home before this one was a party home. I literally had a cocktail party the night we moved in and after that it was always party central. I managed to recreate that Italian spontaneous food, drink, music and fun gathering last Friday by chance, I’m happiest in my home when there are people eating, laughing and drinking around me. I miss the oldness of our last home, a large Victorian terraced house. Now it is a new build faux Victorian town house. It is a home for the petit garcon, it is his house. He rules. He’s always telling me off because I call the living room the living room. He calls it the lounge and corrects me on this matter every time I mistakenly refer to the lounge as the living room!

The most effort I’ve made with the house is in the kitchen. It is very red, black and white. It was an insipid magnolia colour so we painted it red and put black wallpaper up on the end wall. I bought red champagne glasses and black wine flutes. I also collect useless food items as decoration, marmite jars, Selfridges’s coke bottle, old Campbell soup tins and Italian biscuit boxes. We have also started to tend to the garden, so the kitchen and garden are the most loved of the house.

What I need is a beach hut. This would be my preferred home. Or a small place in France near the sea in Normandy or Brittany. I do crave a place by the sea. I spend a lot of time online searching for this place by the sea; it is a fantasy search as I don’t have the funds! I’m not particular about any style of house; I tend to go on how I feel about a house, although I love the Hopper houses in his paintings by the sea. I’m drawn to lighthouses and have lots of pictures of them. I don’t intend to live where we do for ever but for now it is home.
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Kate is the author of Make do Style and Fashion and Film . She is also a stylist and is presently studying for an MA in Fashion and Film at London College of Fashion and her first short film will premier in November.

“Four Walls” by Stephanie Baffone

Published on August 20, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 10 Comments Tags: , , , , , .

When lovely and brilliant Belette extended me the gracious invitation to write about my idea of home it felt serendipitous. A few short months ago, I began writing a memoir in which my childhood home plays a starring role. Growing up, my Mom, Doris saw to it that two small words- thank you, reigned supreme inside our four walls. My Mama taught me well but mostly because I genuinely am appreciative, I’d like to begin, by saying to you, Belette, “thank you.” Not only for the fortune to be included in your series but thank you, for having the courage to expose your vulnerabilities. As a therapist, I know when we expose our vulnerable selves; it creates the space for intimate and meaningful connections to be born. Your blog is a place where I do feel at home and the opportunity to write here feels like the equivalent of moving into your warm and welcoming neighborhood.
Continue reading ‘“Four Walls” by Stephanie Baffone’

“At Home in India” by Braja

Published on August 19, 2009 in Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is and On Home. 11 Comments Tags: , .

At a certain point in our lives, we go home. We go home to see loved ones, and when love leaves us; we go home to celebrate, and when we’re lonely; we go home when death comes, and when new life enters; we go home when we’re beaten, and when we’re proud; we go home to remember, and to forget; we go home to escape the past, or to make a new road into the future. We go home for a lot of reasons.

Whatever the reason, we go because it is the one place where we belong, the place that’s ours, that doesn’t judge, condemn, misunderstand, or dismiss.

My home is truly my shelter, in every way imaginable. It is my retreat, my cave, my comfort zone, my fulfilled desire. But above all these things, it is special because of *where* it is: the holy village of Mayapur, on the banks of the sacred Ganges river, in West Bengal. It is a true sanctuary, offering spiritual depth, beauty, meaning, transcendence, relief, peace, meditation, holy places, faces, sites, rivers, temples, and deities. The sounds of Mayapur are magical, lyrical, liberating, peaceful, and beautiful; an intoxicating array of holy chants, mantras, songs, and bells; a divine choir of birds, people, even dogs and jackals, and countless other beings that reside in this magical place; a blissful view of green, green, and more green, from rice fields to jute crops, palm trees to banana trees. The aromas wrap themselves around the senses: early morning smells of night-blooming jasmine from my garden; the curling smoke from incense offered in the temples as it sneaks into your clothes, your nose, your mind, your heart; the endless array of foods served to visiting pilgrims, friends who visit, or bought from the street stalls, or offered to the Lord in the temples, or cooked at home–all of it sharing the lingering spice of life that is India…

That’s my home….and you’re welcome, any time. :)

Click here to listen to the sounds of my village:

Click here to see a few shots of my home,

(they’re not much but my camera isn’t working right now so they’re older and random)

and here for a guided tour around the town and across the river.
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“Braja is originally from Australia, but has spent most of her adult life living and working in India, London, the United States, and New Zealand. She now lives in West Bengal, India, with her Danish husband, an artist. Her poetry has won awards and has been published in Great Britain and Australia. She writes for several publications internationally, but is still waiting for Vogue to see the light and give her a damned column.

Her blog Lost And Found in India is the account of an Australian writer/editor/spiritualist/wife’s life after she gives up everything and moves to an Indian village with her Danish artist husband, convinced that life had to offer something better than what it had served up so far. Both a funny and touching tour through life in an Indian village, with the ability to swing from outrageously funny to dark and macabre.”

About Me

My name is Tracey, aka La Belette Rouge. I am a psychotherapist and the author of Freudian Sip @ Psychology Today. I blog about psychology, my therapy, dreams, writing, meaning making, home, longing, loss, infertility and other things that delight or inspire me. I try to make deep and elusive psychodynamic concepts accessible and funny. For more information, click here .

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