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Parties. Holidays. Home. — 5 Comments

  1. Some thoughts about “home”

    1. I have moved and sold my possessions several times but I find I always end up getting the same stuff over again, and in arrangement similar to what I had before. So I think one important criterion of home is a space that’s comfortable to the home you have inside your head.

    2. Everyone needs companionship. Someone to come home to. It could be a pet or a person. If you are a guy, and you hook up with a woman, odds are you are going to be near her family. Then they become part of your home, too.

    3. I don’t now if you are in a working situation and/or a relationship situation but those tend to establish the geographical parameters of home.

    4. My first wife was never happy anyplace we lived. In the past 20 years (including of course many after we divorced) she has moved 15 times. But I always figured her inability to stay put was a reflection of the fact that she didn’t grasp that happiness in your surroundings is to a certain extent a subjective thing.

    5. Don’t confuse the need for excitement, positive evaluation and affirmation, etc. etc. with the upside of stability. As I grow older I value transquillity more. And there’s nothing you could ever do to make you more important than you already are.

    Good luck!

  2. Very poignant. Welcome back to NH. If you break down near Goffstown I’ll come help – if my sons bring back the cars.

    We have lived in this house for 18 years, and this town for 30. My older sons knew no other homes but now have their own. My younger sons had a dozen residences in Transylvania – few of them homes – before we brought them here. They have been here longer than any place else, but I think “home” for them will always be an ambivalent concept.

    My childhood homes were mostly in the next town over, but I seldom see those places or any of the people I knew then. There are no remaining relatives. The space itself is part of home; the look of small mountains, where roads go, the flora, fauna, and weather. A few objects, mostly books and inherited furniture, are part of home. It is hackneyed to claim that home is where my wife is, but that is also true.

    If we were purely spiritual beings, then “home” would be inside us and these other things merely the Aristotelian accidents that contain them, but I at least am too material for that. Comfort foods and favorite songs do not merely suggest home, but are part of it.

    You might reread the last few chapters of Tolkien for some observations of where home is, or perhaps “Leaf by Niggle.”

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