Monday, September 14, 2009

Stranger at Home


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I am back from a month on the road. I didn’t say back home. Just back. I have that feeling of discombobulation. Where I live looks strange and dusty and vacant. Nothing has changed except that several bookcase shelves in my office fell off their tracks causing the books to tilt right. It’s as if an energy force got loose in my absence, some invisible house bear that started rummaging. For what? The missing me?


I’m sort of here, but not really.

In the last month, I imbibed the spirit of other people’s homes and I’m still wrapped up in those vectors of other places. Coming back, I recognize every room, every vase, chair and painting on the wall, yet I feel odd, alienated from these familiar objects. I know I put them there but that was me before I left, and now that I’m back, I’m not the same.


And the dining room knows it. It looks lifeless and removed from me. Nothing has been rearranged, yet the tabletop isn’t humming with the previous night’s conversation. No one has eaten there for weeks. The air knows it, too. It smells stale, devoid of scents and seasonings. In fact, all the rooms have a shuttered up feeling. At what point, I wonder, does the house shift from waiting for its owner to return to succumbing to certified vacancy?


Who am I? Where am I? And how do I start to make my home feel like mine again?


Yesterday, my first day back, I took a nap on the living room couch. That put some body heat into the cold cushions, but a few hours later, I was on the internet researching homes for sale in another state. --Oh, there she goes again. She’s off on a fantasy to find something better, someplace that’s far away from where she is now, her traveling self unable to settle down and be still.


I took out the vacuum cleaner to vent my restlessness. I attacked the foyer rug and tried not to be critical of my office. But it was messy: black cat hairs clumped in the weave of the off-white rug. Soon, the noise of the vacuum buzzed the air and sent vibrations through the floors reawakening them as I made my way across the dormant rooms.



I’d been gone. I felt different. I was changed by my travels. I needed to stir this soup called home, mix in remnants of my old life with the elixir of renewal to create something altered. I was ambivalent, frantic, happy, uncertain, churning with the fact that I had returned. I needed to add those fresh ingredients of what I saw, tasted, talked about, smelled; my arm jabbing back and forth, pushing and pulling the vacuum hose like a spoon in a big pot of stew.



How do you feel about your home after you’ve been away on a long trip? Relieved? Happy? Disappointed? All of these things?

19 comments:

  1. You describe the feeling of being back (but not home, quite) after absence so beautifully.

    I have felt all those things, but not in a long time, because now with all the animals who live with us, and have been here in my absence, there isn't the same sense of stillness/staleness there used to be.

    I think too that when I come home now there is immediately something that has to be done - horse chores are many times/day and once I'm home I have to leap right back into that routine. It makes a huge difference in that "between-time" that used to happen for me after traveling.

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  2. Hi, Billie. Don't you notice that your animals also seem a bit amiss? They've had to adjust to someone else's routine, etc? Great to hear from you

    Jessica

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  3. Not too much, as we never all leave at the same time.

    The way we travel has completely shifted since we got the horses - there are enough of them (6 including the donkeys) that I can't just ask someone to stop by and feed, b/c it's a huge job. My older mare (26) has to be fed 4x/day.

    It's too big a job to ask friends/family w/o horse experience to take on, and horse-owning friends have their own to feed/care for - and thus far I haven't found a farm sitter I trust. I've heard some nightmare stories about farm sitters. :/

    So... the animals are mostly fine b/c they never really experience a big change. I feed in the AM, daughter does the mare's two daytime feeds, son does daily grooming,and my husband feeds at night - which keeps us all in the loop. We trade chores enough that the horses don't get too dependent on one person doing the same thing every day.

    Before horses and felines, we actually took our Corgis most places with us - the times we couldn't my mom came and stayed with them.

    I have a fantasy of owning a horse property at the beach and in the mountains so we could pack up the entire menagerie and spend 6 months of the year here, 3 months at the beach, and the remaining 3 in the mountains. Traveling from home to home, over and over again.

    :)

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  4. I often feel the sense of separation when I return from a trip--especially when it's been to another country. It takes me a couple of days to knit back into the routine of washing dishes, making beds (I usually stay in hotels... gotta love those maids), and cooking dinner. Billie makes a good point that my pets really help me reconnect with home--maybe that's because my kids are grown-ups and my husby has become self sufficient in my absence?

    I love your bookshelves. Rather like mine, in fact--sagging from the weight of so much accumulated knowledge. Or do we just clutter our homes with books because we're afraid we'll forget all of that accumulated knowledge?

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  5. Carolyn--tell us about your travels? Where have you been lately? Love this: "knit back into the routine of washing dishes, making beds..."

    Jessica

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  6. I love coming home - right up until I walk through the front door! I always find myself feeling disjointed. Happy to be home but feeling like I need to catch up. As if the house moved on without me.
    Usually, husband is home alone when we're away - so I get back to a spotlessly clean and tidy home. Which the kids make a mockery of within minutes leaving me feeling bad!
    And it takes the animals days to forgive me and adjust to my presence and our usual routine again.

    Cat

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  7. Cat,
    --speaking of pets, my cat usually looks stunned, but the first night she makes up for my gone days, curling and recurling her body for hours inside the crook of my neck and chin.

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  8. I'm just waiting to read a whole book of this... every post is gorgeous.

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  9. Aw, Susan (LitPark).
    From your ears to...
    Thanks for stopping by.

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  10. Tell you about my travels? I'd love to. I wrote more than 5.000 words in my travel blog about my recent adventure trip to Cancun. The stories are linked together beginning with this one: http://bit.ly/um6TV.

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  11. Carolyn,
    Thanks for sharing the link to your travels. Hope everyone who visits here will go take a look: http://bit.ly?um6TV.

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  12. I can't remember the last time I was gone long enough for this to happen, and when I *am* gone, there are usually children and spouse and grandparents and dog to keep the house full and lively.

    The most curious sensation for me was leaving a college dorm room, having taken down all the posters, rolled up my rug and removed my clothes from the room. What was a personalized space just for me -- and the epicenter of so much adolescent angst -- had become in just a few hours once again an empty box, waiting for another college kid in 90 days' time.

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  13. Kristina, that is eerie what you described. So much energy, thought and emotion stripped away in a few hours. Yet, I can't believe that some ghostly vibrations of your life didn't stay behind.

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  14. And right after I hit "post" I thought of the college students inhabiting my various rooms RIGHT THIS MINUTE and which versions of college angst they're enduring...

    Felt the same way about apartments but college life was such a particular kind of intense.

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  15. Kristina--the endless variations of angst. A painter could do a series on it.

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  16. Hi Jessica, got here via Patry. This is such an interesting post. I am an avid and passionate traveler but over recent years it began to dawn of me that part of the attraction of traveling, for me, is the coming home! As soon as I step through the door there is a moment of re-orientation, followed by a cuddle with the cat who forgives (and forgets?) immediately that I had left him alone, a hot shower, unpacking, turning on lights and candles, sometimes music, and generally sliding right back into the comfort and safety of my home like a trusted old slipper. Aaah ...

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  17. Welcome, Kerstin! How lucky that you feel that way upon your return. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

    Jessica

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  18. Yes, wonderful post, but please don't move to another state! I love knowing you're down the road even if we have such a hard time getting together.

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  19. Thanks, Patry. Maybe I need to have a few homes, live in a couple of states to settle me down.

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