Living Out Loud Volume 6: Going Home

I don’t know if I can answer the question, “Where are you from?” by taking a mental trip “home.” Because I’m still sorting out for myself what I think home actually is, and whether I believe the mainstream ideal of home ultimately exists, and because I’m still sorting out for myself where I think home ultimately exists if it does in fact exist, I’m afraid this could be a bit of a bumpy journey.

I always wanted to be one of those people who lived in one place their whole life. A part of me envies the friends I have who grew up in my small town and stayed. I envy the sense of belonging I imagine you must feel in order to remain satisfied there. I envy the contentment, the feeling of being settled, of being in the center of your universe. I know I couldn’t have done it, but still I wonder  . . . is that home?

Geographically, I am from Louisa, a little southern county about halfway between Charlottsville and Richmond, VA.  The house I most consider “home”  – we moved there when I was several months old from a rental down the road – was probably the third house built on what was then a dirt road in the town of Mineral, surrounded on all sides by a thick forest of trees.  The town of Louisa, where I was born in the local hospital in 1964, was a sidewalked lane of old-west type buildings and a courthouse in an area about two blocks long. It had one grocery store, two drive-in movie theaters, and one drug store.  Mineral wasn’t much different, only smaller, and as kids we could travel a path through the woods to visit a friend or walk up the road to the one store in town for a brown bag of penny candy and a Yoo-hoo in a matter of minutes.

When my dad died in 1969 and my mom remarried, we moved, first to another area of Louisa and then up to Nelson County (I went to John Boy Walton’s elementary school!).  For the next fours years I was a mountain kid and did what mountain kids do: played in the creek behind our house, joined 4-H, and reveled in telling the tourists who stopped at the apple packing shed across from our house that there really was no such place as Walton’s Mountain and they should just pack it up and go home.  After 4 years my mom and two sisters minus the stepdad and the dog did just that, moving back into our house in Mineral. Though it now sat on a paved street called St. Frances Avenue and was surrounded by other houses, it held memories of my childhood and memories of my dad, few though they were. We spent the summer cleaning and restoring it back from the disaster our renters had left.

It was 1977, I was 13 years old, and it was the first time I felt connected . . . rooted . . . grounded . . . like I belonged. It wasn’t just the house, though. I’d left a place that pretty much required you to have either a horse or an orchard to fit in and returned to an environment and friends that were familiar to me in an almost nostalgic way; in my short lifespan the years we were gone seemed a lot longer than they actually were, and reconnecting with my past was reconnecting with me, with my dad, and was somehow sort of setting things back on course.

The day we moved from the house permanently, in 1980, I developed a headache and nausea so bad I couldn’t raise my head and was in bed for 3 days. From there my mom and new stepdad moved to an old house in the western end of the county and then to the old farmhouse where they’ve lived in for the past 27 years.  I graduated high school while there, moved briefly to Tennessee and Kentucky, then to Norfolk for college. I’ve lived in Los Angeles. I live in Virginia Beach.

When I think about that house in Mineral, I find myself thinking of the front porch. This is the front porch my dad stands in front of in the photo below. It’s the porch where my mom and my sisters Margaret and Janet and I sat talking late one hot summer night in 1979, a rare occurrence ended all too soon when Janet interrupted the peace of crickets and fireflies to innocently ask, “What’s a period?”  This is the porch I painted brown while listening to Charlie Daniel’s sing, “Devil Went Down to Georgia” on a hot summer morning. This porch is the first place I sat and talked with one high school love and it’s the last place I sat to break up with another.

It’s also the same porch that the ambulance backed up against to take my dad to the hospital when he lost a battle with leukemia, and that house has given me my share of nightmares. My first vivid dream left me no doubt that I dream in technicolor. A big black and white wolf stands on his hindlegs outside my parent’s closed door, and he’s going in, but before he does he turns and looks at me. His teeth are white and bared, his lips, bright red.

The second was of my sister and I being chased though the house by an old man.  I try to crawl down the hallway and get away from him, but he grabs me by the back of my pants. I struggle free and make it to the living room where his old wife is sitting on a footstool between me and the door, ready to snag me as I pass. I find myself outside in the backyard climbing the clothesline pole to get away but the old man is once again pulling at me from below and I can’t get loose.

For a long time I had a repetitive dream of being locked inside the house at night, its doors and windows slamming shut and refusing to let me out. Now I dream that I visit the house, and each time I walk through it has been remodeled, barely showing evidence of its former self. In an attempt to stop the dreams I once went by to ask the current owner if I could walk through, but no one answered.

As someone who spent a good portion of her life moving past being the kid who’s dad died, and as someone who spend a lot of time moving and looking for home, I haven’t quite decided if I believe that where I’m from determines who I am. I think we choose unconsciously to hold onto some pieces of our experiences and to let go of others. I think if we’re lucky we realize that where we come from and what we experience don’t have to be who we are and at any point we can consciously pick and choose what we want to pack in those boxes and take forward. I think we form perceptions of events and places from our past based on our own point of view, but that point of view may not be based in actual reality . . . so I think we get to write the book, so to speak and can rewrite it if we so choose.

I don’t know quite yet what, or where, I consider home or if I even think that home as a geological, physical place exists. It just keeps going back to that porch, and from it there are two directions: Going back in the house isn’t an option, as I know that as much as I envy others the comfort of familiarity, I’m not feeling those warm snugglies. As it stands the places that have served to provide the stability, peace or sense of belonging for me are varied and may or may not include the actual presence of the family and friends I love: my parents backyard on a summer morning before anyone else has gotten up; driving cross country on old back roads with nothing familiar in sight and the unknown up ahead; a friend’s backyard at nightfall, surrounded by trees and silence; a bench high atop the hills, overlooking Los Angeles clear out to the Pacific Ocean, and knowing almost no one,  well,  . . . except for me.  As porches go, the view ain’t so bad.

My dad standing next to his porch.

The house in Mineral as it looks now.

My parents' backyard in the morning.

My bench atop the Hollywood Hills.