Shut the Door!
Welcome to my random musings about the world, on a weekly-to-occasional basis.
Where we are: We’re still in Brasov, Romania. We rented a car last week and explored some spectacular castles in the Carpathian Mountains—I highly recommend.
Shut the door!
A friend who left North Carolina to live in France (hi Darlene!) asked me recently what home means to me. She has an apartment in a beautiful old French building; she goes on trips around Europe, but then she goes back to the home she and her husband have made together. That’s quite different from what Lee and I do—we don’t have that ‘home base’ to go back to.
I used to love going home. I loved the anticipation of sleeping in my own bed, with my own pillow. I had the perfect pillow—just the right thickness, with the right amount of give. I loved restocking the refrigerator, because let’s face it: buying groceries is one of my absolute favorite things to do. Home was where I knew the oven’s hotspots, and which stair had a creak, and how to angle my minivan into the garage just so. I’d wake up the morning after a trip, make tea the way I like it, in my yellow mug, and gaze out the window at whatever was growing out of control in our backyard.
Nowadays, one of the most common questions we get from people we meet is some variation on ‘Where’s your home base?’ They’re putting us into a category they understand, assuming we go on a ‘trip,’ then go home again. We don’t have that home any more; we get a lot of strange looks when we explain. But it’s actually pretty simple, once you get over the mental hump of everyone lives somewhere.
It’s all about hooks. We all have a subconscious tendency to organize knowledge by hanging it on mental ‘hooks.’ It’s a way of categorizing incoming information, of recognizing patterns. When a piece of information comes in, our brains are determined to group it with similar information. I meet a new person, I ask where they’re from, and my brain quickly runs through my mental file cabinet to ascertain what I know about that place. The process is unconscious on my part, but it’s the foundation of figuring out who this person is.
If the answer to ‘where are you from’ is I don’t have a home, most peoples’ brains come to a screeching halt. They don’t have a mental file for that. Most people have never met someone who doesn’t have a home, and if they have, they considered that person an unfortunate victim of mental illness or economic misfortune. We are neither—just a little quirky.
At any given moment, though, I do have a sense of where my ‘home’ is. I use the word every day, to refer to wherever we’re staying. A hotel room, an Airbnb—once, a fancy tent in the desert. I wheel my little suitcase into a space, close the door, and I am home.
It’s the door that is significant, I’ve decided. I’ve mentioned before that I’m an introvert—I love meeting new people, chatting, making friends, but I find it exhausting. The antidote is regular and frequent solitude.* I don’t need much space—a small hotel room is enough, especially if it has a bed, some drawers, a bit of shelf space, preferably a chair. On some visceral, perhaps even unconscious level, if I have that space, I can mentally be anywhere, or nowhere in particular. But being able to close that door against the world is essential.
Home, to me, is wherever I can control my space by closing the door. I think that’s why we don’t really like homestays or Couchsurfing, or other situations where we’d be sharing space with someone else. I hear about intrepid travelers who stayed with a family in their yurt in Outer Mongolia and how amazing the experience was, and I shudder at the thought. I’d probably quit traveling before I’d do that. Just—no. We chartered a sailboat for a week a few years back—basically, we rented a room on a boat that was the home of a Swedish couple and their two young kids. I kind of hated the entire week. There were lots of reasons, but one particular problem was the fact that I couldn’t just be anywhere truly private. Especially when I needed a good cry.
On days when we’re moving from one destination to another—we call them transition days—we both feel a little untethered. I pack my suitcase, sling my backpack over my shoulders, and fumble through airports or train stations. On our most recent roadtrip, though, our banged-up Dacia Logan (fondly referred to as the Shitbox) actually started to feel like home. We stashed some cookies and a roll of paper towel in the back seat, and driving from Belgrade to Sarajevo was just another day of beautiful scenery and burek for lunch. We’ve gotten used to occasionally floating free in the world, rootless other than the backpacks, but there was less of that feeling when we knew we could always retreat to the car and close the door against the heat, the cigarette smoke, and the impenetrable language.
At the risk of sounding like a cliche, I guess home is a state of mind.
*The elephant in the room, so to speak, is Lee—over our decades together, I have developed a very high tolerance for his presence. Nowadays we’re usually together 24/7, but we both have headphones, so it works. Once in a blue moon, though, I revel in the odd moment when he’s out for a walk or running an errand.
From my writer’s notebook:
I stumbled across an article last week about an item sold at auction in the UK—an antique vampire-fighting kit. Vampire lore is on my mind here in Transylvania, for obvious reasons, so I was intrigued to see that the kit in question sold for more than fifteen thousand dollars—seems like a lot to me, but what do I know about vampire fighting? It contained all the important equipment: holy water, wooden stakes, crucifixes. It even had a handy mallet, to make the whole driving-a-stake-through-the-heart task a little easier. It’s always important to have the right tools for the job, y’know?
Take care,
Lisa
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