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by Kristine Scholz of A Shelter From The Storm

“You can never go home again, But the truth is you can never leave, so it’s ok.” Maya Angelou

I was watching an episode of Buy Me on HGTV this afternoon that featured an elderly couple, both of them 84 years old, who were trying to sell the house they’d lived in since 1953. That’s the year I was born, 1953. The couple had raised their five children in that house, and the mental struggle the wife went through as she sifted and sorted through all the memories and bits and pieces of her life was very bittersweet. The pain in her eyes, her indecisiveness about what to keep and what to get rid of  is something I think every woman of every age goes thru at different stages in life. It seems like we’re always saying goodbye to something–our girlhood, our youth, our children, and, if we’re blessed to be together as long as this woman and her husband have been, sometimes even our beloved spouse.

I’ve lived in many houses in my lifetime: one in the town I was born in, five in my hometown, three in Vancouver, Washington, before I was married, and seven others with my Dear Hubby before finally settling here in the house we live in now, where we’ve been for close to twentyfive years. This, by far, has been the happiest home I’ve ever lived in. It’s a Craftsman style bungalow built in 1912 and is in an old urban neighborhood that’s a mixture of houses built anywhere from the late 1800s to a skinny little house, fourteen feet wide, that was built  over the past few months on a narrow vacant lot down the street.  We’re within walking distance of every school my children attended, and many of our neighbors have been here even longer than we have. We’ve watched each others’ kids and even grandkids grow up. We’re a close bunch, but never intrusive. Somehow, we’ve managed to co-exist very peacefully all of these years. A good thing, since most of our houses are so close to each other we can reach out a window and almost touch the house next to us.

What makes a home? Is it the creaky old fir wood floors that have been scuffed with countless feet over the past ninety-four years? The old lathe and plaster walls that are cracked and warped in places? The kitchen cabinets that needed an updating twenty years ago, and will get done when we get to them? The groanings and creakings of the old gas furnace in the basement every time it comes to life? Is it the envelope postmarked in 1941 that we found tucked in a wall during a remodel job twenty-three years ago?

No. It’s the ghostly shouts and laughter drifting in through the windows on a summer day, of endless games of Capture the Flag all the neighborhood children played together. It’s finding a couple of little boys building a fort in the huge laurel that borders our back yard boundary and feeding them popsicles. It’s digging in my flower beds and unearthing an old Fisher Price toy fireman buried under the dirt for who knows how many years. It’s going searching back in a dark corner of the basement for something and coming across my daughter’s wooden stove and sink set, unused for twenty-five years and covered in dust.  It’s looking for the cedar waxwings each early Autumn, never knowing if they’ll show up in the huge holly tree out back and hoping with all my heart they do, and being thrilled beyond words when I spot their beautiful yellow wings flickering among the branches. It is cradling my little grandson in my arms for his first ride on my front porch glider. It is coming here, a young mother of twenty-eight and, most probably, never leaving until the day I die.

So, yes–I can relate to the pain in that older woman’s eyes. I can see myself sorting thru the boxes and bins that store my life and not knowing which to toss, which to pass on to my children. Are they going to want my old paper dolls, my useless bits of jewelry from my childhood that mean nothing to them but transport me to certain moments, certain friends and people, who’ve passed thru my years here on earth, every time I hold them in my hands? Are they going to want this blog journal? Do they care that much about how I lived, what I thought, what I felt? What I dreamed? The woman that I truly am here within me?

I agree with Maya Angelou. We never do leave home. Every house we’ve ever lived in has helped form us into who we are, has followed along with us every step of the way. It’s the ghostly whispers, the quiet moments, the tears and grief, the joy and love, the celebrations we celebrated in each and every one of them that make up our dwellingplace, the inner heart of us. Home is not walls and a roof, no. It’s the structure that houses the very essence of who we are.