Obsessed With Home
Obsessions go hard, I guess. It’s not a shocker that I’m obsessed with the idea of home — and, specifically, that complex feeling of homesickness, which is its flipside I suppose. Matt and I are just about done emptying the house that will be undergoing a big ol’ renovation, and today I came across a box of all my old clips from the Tufts Observer. Here’s the first thing I ever wrote for the publication where I eventually creeped my way up to Editor-in-Chief. Color me surprised. (Not at all.) I didn’t know what I was writing, really; I just knew that my background and points of reference were a little different from the throngs of students mostly from NJ, NY, MA, and sometimes CT, so I guess I needed to get pen to paper to make sense of that somehow. The specter hanging over all this wondering via simplistic writing was my parents’ cross-country move to Washington, DC right before I wrote this. (ie Where is home?!?!)
This weekend we were back at Tufts to see our son’s first football game. However, this was not a home game for him…we were in the visitors stands. Which is how it often goes, right? I keep finding myself back in places that have been “home” at one time or another, but the context keeps changing. My parents don’t live in DC — in the house where Matt and I got married — any longer. In fact, my brother texted me last week because he saw that house on the market. Y’all have had the experience of seeing an old home on Zillow, right? With other people’s furnishings and the understanding that they think this is *their* home they are selling? (OK, fine, strictly speaking it *is* theirs.) That darn context: It keeps changing.
Maybe one day I’ll figure it out. In the meantime, I’ll quote Deborah Levy (from Real Estate, part 3 of her awesome Working/Living Autobiography trilogy) once again: “I mean it was not my real estate, I did not own it, I was renting it, but I owned its mood.”
(And to illustrate that life marches on even if you’ve left, hooray for the new Green Line extension that goes all the way to Tufts! But Davis Square, I still love ya.)
originally published on instagram