There Is No Place like Home, Whatever That Is
October 14, 2024 at 03:30PMWhat does “home” mean to you? Where is it? Who is it? For The Common Reader, essayist Jeannette Cooperman writes a series of ruminations on the buildings we live in, the childhood homes we miss, the houses we dream about or cannot afford, the geographic places that are part of our identities long after we’ve left, and even the loved ones we seek as refuge.
One cannot steer the homing instinct; it finds affinity wherever it chooses. Often home is where the old people are—grandparents and porch-rocking neighbors who stayed put their whole lives, ballast to keep everyone else’s voyage stable. Without people who stay there, a place is soulless.
Home orients every cell in our bodies. Some species cannot survive even a few yards from their tiny ecosystem, their unique habitat. I am more of a crow: as long as I have my creature comforts, I am willing to pick at any city’s cuisine. Do those of us who are adaptable and a little shallow—not in values, necessarily, but in how sentiment inscribes itself—suffer from our lack of rootedness?
In grad school, I was briefly engaged to a guy who informed me that we would have to live by an ocean. In fairness, he had grown up in the Philippines, surrounded by ocean. But I had no need to live by a soybean field.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/14/there-is-no-place-like-home-whatever-that-is/
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