BOOK

“And so the days pass. I keep waiting for something to happen, for the ease I feel to end.” These are the words that Claire Keegan gives to the narrator — a young Irish girl sent to live with distant relatives — in Foster. The girl is in the middle of a gaggle of siblings, and the reader guesses that it is the imminent arrival of yet another baby that prompts the girl’s migration from a chaotic home with hints of trouble to the tidy, childfree Kinsella home where she is told to “make [herself] at 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?!?!)

I ran by this guy the other day who was wearing a Tufts shirt. I was wearing a “Bowdoin Mom” shirt. (Yup, I am 100% that dork who wears “Mom” shirts from my kids’ schools.) This is likely meaningless to you if you’re not familiar with a certain subset (or “milieu,” because let’s face it, “milieu” is probably an apt word choice in this case) of small colleges. As I approached this young guy, he smiled really big, pointed at his shirt, and then pointed at mine. I knew exactly what he meant: One way or another, there was a tacit agreement that we A) understood a certain culture and were both part of it, and B) were currently situated outside that culture. Then I made it more confusing because right as we passed each other I took my ear bud out (why?) and pointed more aggressively at his shirt and said, “I’m an alum!” probably way too loud. (Let’s also spend a minute envisioning the other people who may have been around who all of a sudden heard only “I‘m an alum!” punctuating the relative silence.)

When a book makes you homesick…