There is a moment near the end of The House of the Seven Gables where Clifford gives an impassioned speech to a fellow railway traveler about how increasing ease of transportation will take humanity away from the concept of house and home.
My impression is, that our wonderfully increased, and still increasing, facilities of locomotion are destined to bring us round again to the nomadic state...Transition being so facile, what can be any man's inducement to tarry in one spot? Why, therefore, should be build a more cumbersome habitation than can readily be carried off with him? Why should he make himself a prisoner of life in brick, and stone, and old worm-eaten timber, when he may just as easily dwell, in one sense, nowhere - in a better sense, wherever the fit and beautiful shall offer him a home? ... it is my firm belief and hope, that these terms of roof and hearth-stone, which have so long been held to embody something sacred, are soon to pass out of men's daily use, and be forgotten.Lately I've been thinking about where I'm headed next. This is the longest I've lived in one place since moving away from home, and Ann Arbor has become more like home to me than any place I've lived yet. So leaving really forces me to think about house and home in ways I haven't before. Reading this passage was interesting to me because the book is about a family who has lived in one place, one house, for over 200 years, and it struck me that Clifford's prophecy that changes in transportation would cause us to become a much more transitory people were actually sort of true.
When I moved to Michigan, I learned that my great grandfather had also attended the University of Michigan, with his wife and two sons in tow. My family has often reflected on how different an experience it is for me - not because Ann Arbor has changed in the past seventy-odd years (though it has), but because transporting myself hundreds of miles from my family is not nearly as huge a step. My great grandparents made this move in an era of planes, trains, and automobiles, telephones and a well-developed mail system, but moving from the West to the Midwest nevertheless meant temporarily cutting themselves off from family support in a way that I have never experienced. I live in an age of cell phones and email and easy air travel. I head back across the country at least twice a year, and have had three visits from my parents and four from my little sister. Home is still home, but leaving is not a life-wrenching experience.These days, most of us can expect to move from one house/apartment/condominium to another several times before we settle (and some of us never will). If our family homes are the ones we grew up in, they are haunted by the ghosts of our childhood, and not of our ancestors (and I do not necessarily mean ghosts of the unpleasant kind). Houses pass from family to family, not parent to child. We are not nomads, and we still long for the familiarity of home, but that home is much more personal than familial, and much more transitory.
I don't know where my home is. I have many childhood memories attached to my parents' house and my grandparents' houses, and in a sense they all feel like home. But I don't consider them my home. Nor do I think of Provo, where I lived for six (noncontinuous) years as home anymore, and someday, possibly soon, I will not think of Ann Arbor as home. I still have an attachment to all of these places, though, and to Virginia and to Madrid. They were all once home, and therefore are all a part of me.
It gets a little crowded after awhile, having so many former homes bumping around inside, and I think that's why I also have the part of myself that wants to settle down somewhere. Eventually. But I also love that I have lived in so many different places and have had good times and hard times in each one, and have learned and grown and made them all a part of me. It makes me eager to try it with the next place. I think there is sometimes a misunderstanding when I say I don't want to move back to Utah or to California. It's not that I dislike either of those places, or that I think I would be "ending up" there. Rather, those places are already a part of me, and I still ahve room for more.
I'm not opposed to going back to a place I've been before. I went back to Provo once, and my second experience there was entirely different from my first. Maybe Utah or California will turn out to be the place for me. But I also think it would be fun to try somewhere new, or new for me. And when I do that, it also gives my family opportunity to try it out with me - my parents and my sister all got to discover Michigan, just like I did. At the moment, not knowing where I'm going next is more unnerving than anything. But if I let myself think about it, and trust that there will be a next, it's also sort of exciting.
2 comments:
As a Navy brat, I moved a bit as a child, to the point where I had attended 10 different schools before I graduated from high school (and 3 schools in one year at one point). The longest I had spent at any school was about 2 years.
I suppose some of this is changing for me, in part because of buying my own home, but I find that I value the relationships I have with people far more than the actual places that I have lived.
My family may not be close geographically, but we remain very close emotionally. Similarly, many of my good friends have moved away, but we have managed to maintain our friendships in spite of distance.
It's a two-edged sword. Yes, we lose a sense of permanence because of our transitory society. But we also gain a greater ability to communicate and visit with our friends, which can allow friendships to endure under circumstances that would otherwise have been more difficult.
I'm in the same boat. I've even lived in the same apartment for three years now. I'll be moving sometime this summer and so far my considerations are Florida, Mass, Indiana, and Oregon, of which I have absolutely no connections to any of those states.
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