Archive for the ‘Home Is Where the Guest Blogger Is’ Category

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.

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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.

“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