Home

A popular writer’s trick in Renaissance times was to respond to a poem or play by writing one right back, akin to commenting on someone’s Facebook post, I suppose. For example, Christopher Marlowe wrote a sugary little poem called “The Passionate Shepherd to His Love,” a piece my high school students loved for its obvious plea for sex. Sir Walter Raleigh thought it’d be clever to reply to Marlowe’s speaker with a resounding NO, so, writing in Marlowe’s style, Raleigh cooked up “The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd.”

Funny.

I don’t know what Renaissancians thought of all this highbrow banter. My guess is the folks who would have gotten a big kick out of the exchange couldn’t read any of it. We live in better times, yes we do.

---

I have a friend who blogs. Okay, I have a lot of friends who blog. And although none of us writes in iambic tetrameter (or I’m just not smart enough to spot it), we volley ideas back and forth, post to post. We text, we chat, we lunch, and we write. Better times, indeed.

In her blog Boundary Stone, my friend Lauren is spending the month of December writing about home. In her first post on this topic, she asks her readers, “What is home?” It is a provocative question, one not as easy to answer as I initially thought. Because she challenges me to think deeply, I’m going to reply to her blog post, a là Marlowe-Raleigh, with a post of my own. Here ‘tis:

---

I used to think home was a place. When I was a teenager, I combed through the annual JCPenny catalog, choosing sofas and dishware for my future home. I wanted my house to be beautiful, and for me, that meant color-coordinated. I chose dishware and fabrics in cornflower blues and honey oaks and waited for the day when I would be home.

Then I went to college. Somewhere between Statistics and American Literature, I became so enamored with erudition that I made what I hoped would be a permanent break from my past.  I severed ties with nearly everyone in my family, including a fiancé. I ditched plans to become a teacher and chose a life of literature and writing instead. In those years, I would have shunned any concept of home, dismissing it as a false sense of security appealing only to the middle classes. Patooey. If anyone had asked me what I thought of home, I would have shuddered.

Then I married a man with two children. I began building a refuge for my ready-made family. For quite a few years, that meant packed lunches and soccer games and birthday parties and science fair projects, and I loved it all, even though my home was never the well-ordered, peaceful haven I’d once dreamed of. Plus this: once in a while, a small voice broke into my thoughts with questions about my dreams to write and teach and engage in mission work, but I could generally shush her up with M&Ms and a good novel.

The children became adults and went to college, and the husband earned unconscionable amounts of money. Aha, I thought, now I can build my beautiful home. But instead of following the heart of the girl who loved soft colors and warm spaces, I sought to please PTA moms and executive wives and an increasingly dissatisfied husband. To be sure, it was the right address in the right neighborhood. Features of it nurtured my family. Compliments abounded during the endless stream of parties I hosted.

But I was still far from home.

---

“What is home?” is a delightful question, one that nowadays floods me with the happies: a favorite spot to read, the aroma of sautéed onions, baby succulents on the window sill, a smiling, freckle-faced man.

So my response to Lauren’s question took me by surprise. What’s with all the seriousness, I wondered. Is my home now so very different from ones from the past?

Yes.

There is an ocean of sadness inside of me. I once lived in a place with a fireplace and Christmas trees and good art, to be sure, where family and friends loved each other, just not always well. I can’t ignore the blood and decay and paramedics in the middle of the night, though, standing over a man so lost, he could only find peace in death.

Lauren? Are you listening? Here’s what home is today: inviting memories into the right now. I am in a home I love in every conceivable way (with the possible exception of the mice Matt keeps finding in the garage). I am a home, a repository of good things and bad things and growing things and dying things, of hard truths and sweet lies, of pain and forgiveness, of things present and things to come.

I am home. And Home is very much on its way.