Home Sweet Home

“I don’t regret this life I chose for me.
But these places and these faces are getting old,
So I’m going home.
Well, I’m going home,
~Chris Daughtry (Home)

Today is my anniversary, the first anniversary of my life in this apartment. In all the rest of my prior life I had never spent any 12 consecutive months at one address. So, welcome home, to me.

Growing up, my family split life between two houses in different states. My brother and I went to school and my parents worked in one state, and we visited the other every single weekend, school vacation, and summer. As a side note, this really stunted my social development and affects how I (don’t?) connect with people today. Jumping around led to a discontinuity in my relationships with others. I vow not to do this to my children. My Dad is, and his dad was, a wanderer. Perhaps it is a rebellion against my family, and I bucked this for a long time, but I am not a wanderer. I’m a content-with-home&hearth kind of person.

In university, I split my life between two different countries, school in Canada, work/summer in the US. In each of these two situations, yes, I did return to the same address year after year, but I was never there for 12 months in a row.  Since leaving university, I’ve had a couple leases that just didn’t work out.

About a year ago, I mentioned this phenomenon as a reason why I didn’t want to move, again (I was constructively evicted by a landlord who turned out to be a crook and and asshole…I later sued and won, but never collected…the legal system let me down, but that story’s a whole post in itself). My boyfriend asked of all the places I’ve lived, which one felt like ‘home’? Initially, I didn’t have an answer. I’ve long said that “home is where your favorite pillow lies”, but I never stopped to compare my various addresses. Eventually, I decided that my tiny, dark studio apartment in Montreal was the most like ‘home’. I spent three winters in that cave; it contained all my worldly possessions (I didn’t keep a car in the city), and it’s where I took significant steps toward becoming an adult. I learned to cook in that apartment. The first winter I lost 15 pounds because I was so bad at cooking, but I worked it out; I like to cook, now. I had to take on the responsibility of keeping the whole place clean. All right! I confess, I still don’t do my dishes every day. Actually, that apartment had few redeeming qualities, but it was all mine.

The place I live now is huge by comparison. It is a 1 bedroom (separate living/dining room, so not a studio) with hardwood floors, high ceilings, and westward facing windows that let in tons of afternoon sunlight. Boyfriend bought me some artwork for Christmas (Ansel Adams, I love b&w photography) to go with all my mismatched random furniture and strange tall empty walls. It overlooks the main northbound street in my town, and it does get a little noisy in the summer when the motorcycles spend all night drag racing down the street. It’s an old building with old plumbing fixtures and radiators for heat. There is even an elevator shaft, but no elevator. When the building was constructed, they planned to put in an elevator but didn’t have the money, so the shaft was built anyway so one could be installed later. When later arrived, they couldn’t purchase a system that would fit in the dimensions of the shaft! But the best thing of all? I don’t pay for heat! This was the first winter in three that I was actually warm.

I’ve waited a long time for this moment. But I still don’t feel like I’m quite home yet. I’m pretty sure this isn’t the place (town, state, coast) where I belong. I wonder if I’ll ever find that home, or if I really am just the next generation of a wanderer family.