Yet Untitled 145 - Two Homes
Musing on the two centers of my life via a short photo-essay
Dearest Yet Untitler,
Twenty years ago, I came to work in the city. I had left my small town years before that - first for boarding school, then for college, then for university abroad. But all those years felt like they were a transition to my finally settling in the megapolis where I now dwell.
Recently, however, I’ve placed one leg back in my homestead. Various circumstances led to that - some of which I’ve written about - but a rhythm has set in - a little time there each month before returning to my predominant existence amid the dug up streets of my city.
I call both places home, but the word means slightly different things with regard to either. Home is where my wife and children are, where I am in the city - the place I’ve chosen to return to for 20 years. Home is also the place where the food I grew up eating is still cooked, in an uncannily exact same way.
When I think about it, if my other home where I grew up is the ‘roots’, there where I am in the city must be ‘leaves’. I’m aware that I’m reaching for the sky when I’m in the city. And I must. What good are roots if they don’t feed into the leaves. How will the world breathe if the leaves didn’t follow through with their alchemy of carbon and water to create oxygen?
One place is a Womb. The other is the World. While we may not consciously want to crawl back into the womb, but I think we’d be lying if we don’t acknowledge the unconscious longing to exist within its protective security once again. But to the world we are consigned. The womb - is it even remembered? Perhaps at the level of instinct. It’s the place where we sleep easier, engulfed, suspended in a sense of protection.
There’s a smell in that old world - something these emanates from dark and cool cupboards in the summer, from bathrooms that have escaped renovation for decades, and from books gazed at but not opened in one’s first decade. The other place, it’s where the BMC has wrecked havoc - where fish smells pervade, where sewage suddenly sends up a sensorium of decay; and the rain then comes to temporarily wash all the dirt away.
Despite that, I like my city’s forward momentum, when it feels like an airport at the start of a holiday, full of that feeling of a complete excursion still lying ahead, charged with the excitement of running into friends unexpectedly at the lounge buffet. The home where I grew up feels like it’s pinned in time - in suspended animation - a specimen in ethanol. But like a good photograph, that stasis is not just comforting but nourishing.
My city home is a place of hunger. My childhood home is a place where I collapse satiated. My city home is a place of ambition, My childhood home is where I can gaze from a distance and take stock.
Grateful for both. Grateful to have you to listen to.
Thanks, always for listening.
V
Drop me a line. I love to hear from you, always!
And…
Also:
I share your sentiments. My two homes are half way around the world from each other, across the Atlantic. One place where I was born, and the other where i "grew" up - where I came into my own, with work, with life and as person
♥️