On searching for a home in the world (Patreon)

Hello friends,

Over the summer, Dade asked me if we could consider moving back to Maryland. Truthfully, as soon as we moved to North Carolina, I had this feeling that I had brought him to the wrong place. It didn’t suit him. His Baltimore personality is not very compatible with Asheville. The vibe is just…off. There were practical reasons too, such as the lack of medical care, but for him it was definitely something deeper.

Meanwhile, I was thriving here. Particularly because I had my dream job working at a used bookstore and I got along so well with the owner that, as even my sister said, he seemed like practically part of the family. The town had such a sense of community, and it makes me feel like I live in an artist’s colony. Still, over the summer months I did start to consider it more deeply. It was one thing to enjoy myself here, but even I had never stopped referring to Maryland as “home”, even though I had only lived there for 7 years.

The hurricane exacerbated things. The trauma of it gave me an increased feeling of, “I want to go home”, but while Maryland is definitely home for Dade, sometimes I have more of the sense that…I just don’t really have a home. And maybe I never will. Plenty of people don’t really have a “home”, they just have a “place they live”. Is it possible to make a home? Or do you have to find it, and where do you look? One thing I learned here is that you can make friends and meet cool people, and that does matter a lot. But places also matter: the geography, the architecture, that mysterious “energy” you can sense even if you can’t quite explain why some places feel sad and depressing or alienating to you and others feel so, so right.

I don't know what the next 2-3 years will bring, and I definitely hope I can rebuild the bookstore before I make any moves, but...Maryland does have a pull.

I’ve known people who just consider themselves “citizens of the world”, content to move every so many years; others who rest eyes on the perfect new spot and just KNOW, like love at first sight. I’ve known people who are rooted where their ancestors have been for generations, and people who have a sort of dual citizenship, such as living in a city they love while frequently going back to their roots on vacations. I’ve known people who feel like their home is on another continent where they have no hope of living, but can only visit now and then.

I’ve always been a homebody myself, and deeply drawn to the idea of falling in love with a place…a house, a street, a city, a landscape...getting to know it until it’s a part of you, living the rest of your days in the place you love so much. Many of my favorite books deal with love and pride of place—L. M. Montgomery’s love of Prince Edward Island, for example… (But she spent much of her adult life in Ontario.) I grew up in Florida, and hated living there. I hated living there the whole time. It’s not that I actually hate Florida itself…it has gorgeous beaches and magical wild places, primeval landscapes of moss and herons, cypress and palmetto that are unlike anywhere else. I fell in love with St. Augustine and Sarasota, and it had some damn good restaurants. I just never felt like I should be living there. I never felt like a Floridian. My body was stuck there but my heart was ready to fly north as soon as it could, and I did.

It was when I moved here, in fact, that I realized my heart is STILL pointing north, sure as a compass…but then, you still have to find a suitable community—one with a culture that suits you, one you can afford, and one that you’re legally permitted to live in. (Canada isn’t an option, for example!)

I often wonder if ancestral memory has any part in this sense of “home”. Did my blood simply scream protest the whole time I was growing up in Florida? My grandparents had chosen central Florida as home, due to jobs and quite possibly the warm weather and glamour that Florida has offered the public imagination. I can imagine that Florida must have seemed like an adventure compared to the cold winters and working class neighborhoods of Lorain, Ohio, near the shores of Lake Erie, where I have my deepest family ties in the US, on my dad’s side. But Florida was certainly an anomaly in the family tree, which has no southerners to be found.

I fell down a genealogy rabbit hole for a bit this week, prompted by curiosity about what region of Germany my favorite great-grandmother’s family had come from. Dade did a DNA test a couple years back that showed he was about 65% German and about half Bavarian specifically, a shockingly consistent result for someone whose family had been in the US for generations! My own heritage is considerably more mixed, I have doses of English, Scottish, French, Italian…but my maternal grandmother is from Germany and came to the US as a teenager, so we had very German Christmases, with toys in our shoes on St. Nicholas Day and imported paper advent calendars, Grandma and her mother “Oma” (who lived with my grandparents when I was a kid) speaking German to each other, and the cuisine is certainly in my blood. I even finally learned to love the beet and herring salad for New Year’s.

My great-grandmother Mary Smith was my dad’s dad’s mom, and she lived to be 101, so at the age of 20 I was at her 90th birthday party, where she was still a lively woman who had been a regular and delightful presence throughout my childhood. She was probably the most “fun” of all the oldest generation, with birthday checks, kindness, a hearty appreciation for beer, and a ready laugh. She often felt more like my paternal grandmother than my dad’s actual mother, who had an air of emotional pain I sensed from a young age, smothered by a veneer of artificial cheer. I know more about Nana’s life now, and why I always sensed sadness in her that made me a little anxious. But my memories of Great-Grandma are definitely easier. We stayed at her house once on a trip to Ohio; she must have been 80 or so and was still in great health. I still remember her delicious chicken and dumplings, the cuckoo clock, the stack of Reader’s Digests she passed on so I could devour the “Drama in Real Life” stories. Not every family member is fun to spend an entire week with, but she was.

Anyway, all I knew of her background is from a family history my aunt sent out tracing the paternal line back to Slapton and Pitstone in Buckinghamshire, England. This history listed my great-grandmother’s mother as having a very German name, but it didn’t get into any of her background. Sometimes it’s quite difficult to find family lines through a Google search without having an Ancestry account, but in this case I actually found them easily; her mother was born in Ohio but her parents and many generations going back were both from parts of Baden-Württemberg, in the western edge of Germany close to France and Switzerland. A lot of them were from Baden-Baden, in the Black Forest.

Here’s Baden-Baden and here’s Frederick, Maryland, where we’ve discussed moving if/when we’re financially able:

There’s a bit of a resemblance! Obviously, not everyone ends up needing to move somewhere based on, what? Ancestral memory? Maybe if you don’t really have a home in the world and you’re a home-ish sort of person, that’s the best you can do.

Do you have a home? Where is it? What makes it home? Or are you still searching, or content to be a citizen of the world?

—Lidiya