Home – not just a house – is vital to most people. It’s the place where we belong, where we’re welcome, accepted, and loved. It’s an essential part of our identity.
We moved to San Miguel de Allende more than two and a half years ago, and I’ve never felt so happy, so much at “home”. The people, history, culture, attitudes, the arts … I’ve found my “tribe”, my rightful place in the universe.
Life hasn’t always been like that for me.
The idea of “home” had always been a bit elusive for me.
Who can forget the plaintive yearning in Bing Crosby’s rendition of “I’ll be home for Christmas”?
For most of my life, Bing Crosby’s voice in that song always made my heart weep. In the same way that seeing a movie in which families, friends, or communities rallied together to overcome a challenge or crisis experienced by one or all of them, always made me feel like a kid with her nose pressed against a window, viewing a scene inside of other people’s love and support for each other, something I was never a part of.
For most of my life, “going home” simply meant returning to the house in which I lived at the time.
There were many houses.
None of them provided welcome, acceptance, or love.
I never understood the magical appeal of “home”
After my mother died when I was 2 ½, my older brother and I were removed from that unhappy San Diego residence to live with our father’s sister and her husband. We slept in an alcove not much bigger than a closet in a coal-mining “house” in Shinnston West Virginia. There was a two-holer out back, shared with a neighbor in a duplicate shack next to ours. Two years later, our aunt had a baby girl, so I was sent to live with her sister, who had moved to Salem Ohio. I was given a new name and told to call her ‘Mommy’. She “had three boys and no girls to help around the house,” as I often heard, with a threat of orphanage when she thought I wasn’t doing the work right. None of my schoolmates or children in the neighborhood ever came to the house. The last birthday cake I had was when I was four, in Shinnston, according to the photo. I never had a birthday party. The physical and psychological abuse was unrelenting (not unusual from a holy-roller hillbilly in those days). Yet she enjoyed showing off her possession who could read before the age of five and sing hymns solo in front of her church crowd. “Am I pretty?” I asked. The answer: “Pretty ugly and pretty apt to stay that way.” I remember often fantasizing that I was actually in a coma, not stuck in that Ohio cage, and that my mother and father were anxiously standing over me, waiting for me to awaken.
It took me months to sneak enough coins from my aunt’s purse to buy a bus ticket to San Diego. I ran away when I was fifteen. I showed up on my father’s doorstep unannounced. He didn’t recognize me. He tolerated my staying there for the next year, till I graduated high school. Although my half-sister (six years younger) often told me, “go back where you came from.”
With a full scholarship to college, I left that house. After a year in college I realized that I’d never had the chance to really “live”, to experience life as most children or teenagers do. I moved into San Francisco, where I met the last of the Beatniks as well as early hippies and Panthers, while I managed to support myself with jobs as a bookkeeper – not being supported as a “flower child” like many of those I met.
After that, it was a string of more apartments and houses, in many parts of the country.
In every case where I lived for more than a couple months, I made my living quarters my nest, my refuge, by including bits of beauty. Art, décor, and interior comfort padded my nest. I would paint, make curtains and decorative furnishings. In some cases, gardens or at least houseplants. That was my version of ‘home’, the closest approximation I could achieve.
Then we moved to San Miguel. Soon, I came to understand home. In the middle of a pandemic. I met people who want to be my friend, come to my house, welcome me to theirs, who smile and hug spontaneously and genuinely, people who actually like me. Love me, even. They accept me, honor me. They are respectful, thoughtful, intelligent, generous, caring and fun. The beauty and comforts of all the nests I’ve created, are all around me now in this small colonial city, embracing me. My nest has expanded. This small city – which feels like a small town – is a close-knit community “where everyone knows your name.”