Home in Daydreaming on the Porch

Quite a number of years ago, in February 1999 to be exact, I wrote an entry about “home” in my first online journal. I had not yet joined Open Diary, but that was soon to come a few months later. It was about a subject that has always been close to my heart, both the literal and subjective meaning of “home.” Where is it and what is it, exactly? It’s much, much more than a physical structure, or course. I’ve never owned my own house in the many towns and cities where I’ve lived. I always rented, but the last time I rented I found a place that was full of trees and open space and was quiet and like a neighborhood. I loved it. It was cozy and warm in winter and nice and cool in summer. I had a recliner chair in the living room where I spent many relaxing hours. Out my bedroom window I loved to look at a tall oak tree as it changed throughout the four seasons. I lived there for 15 years until, in 2011, I moved into my mother’s house in downtown Charleston when her dementia and age made it impossible for her to live by herself. Now as 2015 approaches, I still wistfiully think back to those days when I had my own place, even if I didn’t spend a lot of time there, particularly in the last years I was there.

Prior to my long tenure in that apartment, I had never lived anywhere longer than four years since moving from New Orleans after college in 1973. I had another apartment that I loved, tucked away in woods on the outer reaches of Columbia, SC, and lived there from 1979-1983. From 1983 until 1995 I wandered here and there from short-term jobs to graduate school and back, never staying in one place more than a year or two. It was extremely unsettling and caused a lot of depression and uncertainly about the future – the relentless kind of uncertainty that never goes away. The saving grace of those years was the times it allowed me to make trips across the country, savoring the natural beauty of so many states I had never visited before and learning about their history and the people who settled there, particularly in the western states, which I still dream about and long to revisit today.

Now 15 years after I wrote that online journal entry on “home,” I can attest that I am indeed “there” in that place we all end up at some point in our lives, some much earlier or later in life than others. Charleston is the place now where the present reality and familiarity of a certain, knowable, and seemingly permanent, home is unmistakable. I’ve been here for 20 years, and this city where I spent my youthful vacations at the beach, and where my grandfather’s family was from, seems as much a part of me as the place of my birth, New Orleans, where I lived all my formative years until I was 21. I have been at the same job in Charleston for all those years, my final job and “career,” unheard of in my previous unsettled life. I am proud of that, given my track record before, and it gives me a secure feeling, as much as that is possible in this day and age.

Now,I think a fair amount about what I want to do when I retire in a few years. Will I choose to remain here? Will I move to the Pacific Northwest where my sister and her family are? Will I relocate to the colder dream town in the North Carolina mountains which I dearly love to visit. I could never imagine not relishing the prospect of visiting this place with it’s proximity to the Blue Ridge Parkway and Pisgah National Forest, Asheville, and waterfalls and a wholly different environment and setting than what I have become accustomed to here along the coast of South Carolina. Those are big decisions, and I probably will keep putting off deciding until the time comes when I must do so. Pack up and leave a place where I’ve lived for 20 years? That will be very difficult, but perhaps in my best interest.

Here is what I wrote back in 1999. See how it compares with how I feel today about Charleston or about how I’ve changed or matured into early older age and with that a whole host of new feelings and emotions about the place I now call home.

From my journal, Feb. 18, 1999:

“Someone once described my writings here as “a journal of place,” and I couldn’t have been more pleased with the description. It perfectly captures what the journal is all about (and I would add, what my journal at Open Diary was about also) – an evocation, description and account of the place I call home – Charleston, South Carolina. This city is, for me, a deeply rooted place on the map, but more importantly, a place that has its own “geography of the spirit.” By that I mean this is the city and the mental environment I now choose to call “home.” It is the place I’ve longed to find after years of wandering, travel, job changes, and uncertainty.

“This seaport town, with its spectacular harbor and waterfront, its proximity to marshes, tidal creeks and beaches, has beckoned me for many decades. It is where my maternal grandfather’s parents lived. Nearby Folly Beach is the place of my childhood summer vacation dreams, the beach town we’d return to year after year, particularly after my aunt purchased a house at the far end of the beach. Charleston is a place whose history I’ve absorbed since I’ve lived here full-time for the past four years.

“I recently wrote to someone about this whole concept of “home.” I called home the place where the terrain has become so familiar that you cannot imagine being anywhere else. ‘The streets, the traffic, the traffic signals, the fast food restaurants, other favorite places to eat, the stores, the landmarks, the trees, and vegetation you see every day – the very skies and clouds – seem to belong to that place.’

“This is a very important idea, and it has its good and bad aspects. For one thing, sameness of surroundings can often instill a certain degree of ennui or lassitude in one’s thinking and outlook, and an acceptance of routines without much effort to break out of them. This in turn inspires the search for newness and novelty, which often leads to dissatisfaction or frustration that things can’t perhaps change too much. Or, it fuels the urge to escape on vacation to fresh environments and scenes where the countryside and each little town and city seem exotic for a time. On the other hand, intense familiarity with a place that comes from constantly seeing its streets, roads and neighborhoods and, in the case of historic Charleston, it’s old homes, gardens and courtyards, windowsill flower boxes, narrow streets, harbor front, Waterfront Park, church steeples… – all this makes for a sense of belonging to a place, and a feeling of comfort with its rhythms, folkways, politics, newspaper, street life, culture and history. This is something which grows with the passage of time. I can understand why longtime residents, those families who have been here for generations, have such a high degree of pride, even clannishness…

“Home is ‘where the heart is,’ yes, but it is also where you claim it to be here and now, and where it has existed all along in the past.”

Last updated December 22, 2014