Home...And Feeling Lost

Oshawa Real Estate

"Home is not a place.

It is a feeling."

--Cecilia Ahern

Home.

It is a place of refuge, where we feel safe.  We can close the door and the world, for all its cold cruelties and confusion, will remain on the other side.  It is a place of comfort and familiarity.  The furniture is something we chose and purchased, even the cushions over time have formed to our shapes.  Everywhere we look we see reminders of life's journey; pictures of family and places, all attached to a specific memory that flows warm and comforting like a wave across the warm sands of our mind.  The air itself has a specific smell, a combination of things like perfume and aftershave; pets and the accumulated odors of any number of cooked foods.  No place smells like this.  It is a place where we are free.  We can relax and be our true selves and not have to hoist the sometimes exhausting patina we hold up before others.  Here we can voice opinions we dare not share anyplace else.  Here, our thoughts range into the deep and profound liberated beyond any confining walls.  Here we can express boundless affection, and yes, deep anger.  It is a place where love lives and is shared, where memories are made and bonds strengthened.

And when we've been away, it is the place to which we return.

We've had several of such structures.  Apartments, government housing, houses we bought and rented in places like Missouri, Hawai'i, California, Arizona, Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Colorado.  There have been other places where we stayed with friends and relatives, where we were encouraged to "make ourselves at home."  But even with those warm welcomes, they never really felt like home.  

In 2012, having moved from Pennsylvania to Virginia for work, and after looking at (by count) some 74 houses for sale, we decided to buy into a new development, preferring at last to make our own environment rather than buying someone else's dream. It was a stressful process, learning that we really had to keep a close eye on the contractors to make sure that they did everything they were supposed to.  But on a magical day, we signed our names to about 300 documents, and accepted the keys to our new home.  It was a different experience.  Once we walked through the door, we knew we were home.  Everything there had been built to our specifications and even though the furniture hadn't yet arrived, somehow we knew we were home.  

We were there for five years, hosting our son and his family for three and a half of those years.  As grandparents, we can tell you what a joy it was to have our grandkids running around the place.  But as the calendar turns, life happens, and in the fall of 2017 it became time to leave.  We sold the house in an impossibly short time, shipped our worldly belongings off to our next destination, and after a month in an AirBNB, we left the east for good.

At the time, we were excited. Cheryl would be a contract nurse, so wherever we went it would only be for about three months.  Still having no clue as to where we would settle for retirement, we thought it would be nice to go to several places and "try them on for size" much as one would shopping for a pair of jeans.  We tried Colorado, but the altitude was problematic, and they have real winter there.  We went to Arizona for the summer (yeah...not the best time of year) and while we loved the desert, the heat was at times unendurable.  We went to Southern California, and found a climatological nirvana, but also incredibly expensive real estate and, let's be frank, some truly odd people.   We then went back to Colorado, more to take a breath or two as we sorted out our next destination.  

Cheryl is from Hawai'i, and her family is still there, so it was always at the top of our list.  But those assignments come and go with lightning speed and it took until this past summer before we got the inside track on a contract.  In August, we made the tough decision to sell and donate nearly all of our worldly possessions, especially the furniture that had decorated our homes for the better part of 35 years.  Having pared things down to one 10x10 storage unit, mostly holding winter clothes and documents, we cut loose our excess baggage.  Upon arriving in Hawai'i, we took up residence, sharing the home of Cheryl's 92-year-old mother, for whom I would become the caregiver.

We have been here now for about six months, and while her mom has made us more than welcome, I still don't feel at home.  I have been struggling with a sense of helpless restlessness, knowing that while we live here, it really isn't our home, at least not in the sense that I recognize.  I look around and see the accumulated possessions of her mother's life, marking the signposts of a live well-lived.  It is very clearly her home, as it should be.

This assignment will last for about two years, at which point we will have to make another decision.  The way the math works out, Cheryl would need another two years more to maximize her social security and pension benefits, but she is getting tired and will be feeling the need to leave the workforce.  I am drawing my very small federal pension, and am on the inside track for a very good state job which I can do until my brain becomes too enfeebled to perform.  The more we talk about it, the more we seem to think that Hawai'i is where we will settle. At first glance, this is highly illogical, and financially-speaking the far side of rational.  This is an incredibly expensive place to live. Housing prices start at three-quarters of a million dollars for which you get about 1,200 square feet of single wall wood construction with no air conditioning or heat, no storage, located in deteriorating neighborhoods.  Food is about 30% more expensive here, and everything else just as costly.  You know about KFC's $5 Fill Ups?  Well, they're $8 here.  But in looking at our finances, with us drawing from everything in about two years, we can make it work, even if we end up renting.  It won't be luxurious by any stretch, but at least we won't have to shovel snow.

October and November were unusually hot, the heat and humidity compounded by the power of the sun itself in a place that is a thousand miles closer to the equator.  There were days when it was to steamy to be outside, and all we could do was sit in the living room with three fans and sweat.  In that process, our blood thinned, and we lost all tolerance for cool weather.  This month has been for the tropics very cool, with nighttime temperatures falling into the 50's.  For anyone from anyplace else, that is heaven in February.  But for those who are fully acclimated to the tropics, it is very cold.  Never have I missed a furnace more.  In a previous post, I wrote about making that trip to Kansas City for the AFC Championship game, and how brutal those seven hours in sub-20 degree weather felt.  In the past, that wouldn't have posed much of a challenge.  But now....

I have read science fiction where people who were born on the moon or Mars could never go to earth. Their bone structure, formed in low gravity, was simply too fragile  to survive a 1G environment.  That's kind of where we are now.  We have lost the ability to live in the cold.

But while Hawai'i is home for Cheryl, it just doesn't fit me.  I am resigned to our fate here, as my first priority is Cheryl's happiness.  At some point, we may move into a small house or apartment, and cover the walls and floors with things familiar and known.  We will contact some movers and have them empty our storage unit in Colorado and bring all of that here.  We will have a place where we can let our hair down, relax, and just be us without worrying about making too much noise.  One of my Navy shipmates, also a victim of the frequent relocation, once defined home as "that place where I am free to walk around in my underwear, or less."   While earthy and perhaps uncouth, it probably serves as any other the best definition.  I also once had a definition.  "Home is where the motorcycle is parked."  As my wife tirelessly points out, I don't own one of those anymore.  

But she also has told me that home is as much in the heart as in a place, and wherever I find that which I love the most, that should be my home, wherever and whatever it happens to be.  I don't like to admit when she is right (which is most of the time, darn it), nevertheless I must acknowledge her very wise point.  With our four offspring and nine wonderful grandkids scattered across the land, we are each other's family, and when we are settled on the couch, snuggling in front of the television, I am at home, because she is my home, that space of love, respect, acceptance, and safety where I am happiest.

In the end, that may be all that ever matters.