Homes

I’ve struggled over the last four or five years with the sense of home. When I ruminate on it too long, I realize that I’ve spent my life so far considering place and homes and whether or not I belong to one in particular. I’ve learned to accept the possession of multiple home spaces. During my childhood, I thought of the library as home, my church was home, my parents’ house was home. These I think of as true today. Parts of me are locked into these places, memories took seed and flourished in the garden and off to the side of the house where my sister and I dug holes and made mud pies in the summer. We would pull out the small red table and sit on the front steps with copies of National Geographic and pen our own hieroglyphs in crayon. Something about encoded language appealed to us.

As a teenager, I began to consider places outside of Greenfield as home. I would visit Indy with friends or the Indianapolis Museum of Art with a beau, swapping snowballs for quick pecks in the white glistening gardens, my Converse soaked through. Home grew to include yet another city in undergrad. Anderson was a new community, but I found myself always seeking more.

When I ventured to Ireland for the first time, everything changed. I missed my family and my friends in Indiana, but I met so many fascinating people, inspiring folks who were studying law or philosophy, theology or equine business. There were strong women in my presence with lofty goals and magnanimous dreams. We were our own idyllic cohort, sitting in pubs with a pint for a chat. The adoration I felt for Ireland then took over. Returning to the country only deepened my appreciation for the place, for that extra home. Cork was welcoming and cozy; it was a city that did not ravage, but merely lapped at my face like a dog.

The thing about becoming a part of so many places is that we spread ourselves thin trying to love them. Living in San Francisco now requires a new space be made somewhere in the cavity in my chest for yet another realm. I arrived wary of its streets and crises. In this city, I’ve learned that I enjoy tutoring and that children do not entirely frighten me as an Educational Intern at 826 Valencia. I found that I’m not actually cut out for marketing or publicity, but I can use the tools I gleaned from my mentors at City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. Here I’ve become part of a community of people who gather to discuss Irish history, folklore, and culture at the United Irish Cultural Center. In the last year, I exhumed my love for lore and legend and redefined my pursuit of feminism. I found people in Berkeley studying Old and Modern Irish and the Cailleach, too. I am always longing for Ireland, but I have a home in San Francisco now.

I’ve acquired homes like souvenirs or relics. I’ll make a pilgrimage every year to see them, to touch the craggy cliff edges and the wooded burrows that hitch themselves to the sea shore. I’ll return to old haunts, the cafe on the corner of Barrack St. in Cork, O’Neill’s pub in Maynooth, the park in my hometown with its sloping sled hill and dry summer grass.

I’ll always be moving and roving and always at home with myself.