Another Idea of Home

Nostalgia ... according to the dictionary, is "a bittersweet longing for things, people, or situations of the past. The condition of being homesick."
Isabel Allende, My Invented Country.

A quote that intrigued me because it implies that home can be a person, a time or a thing, as I'd suspected when I had tried to define what home meant to me.

So many writers have written of nostalgia, memory and yearning and occasionally, reading many books, I find something like an answer to a subject I am curious about ... if I'm lucky.

Mourid Barghouti wrote,
Ein al-Deir is not a place, it is a time.
The thorns of the brambles trained our hands and sides to bleed early when we were children returning home at sunset to our mothers. Do I want to scramble through brambles now? No, what I want is the time of scrambling. 'Ein al-Deir is specifically the time of Mourid as a child ...'

Later he writes, Dar Ra'd is not a place, it too is a time. A time of waking up with early prayers to taste the figs picked by the light of dawn.'

Intriguingly, or perhaps not when you realise his birthplace was Ramallah, he continues with, 'The places we desire are only times but conflict is over place'.
Mourid Barghouti, I Saw Ramallah.

Erica Jong appears in an old journal of mine, dated October 2000. She writes, The more I yearned, the more I wrote. Yearning is an essential emotion for a poet.
Erica Jong, Fear of Fifty.

So perhaps that is it ... writers consider these things and are driven to write of them, constantly searching for a way to define something that is almost undefinable, or at least highly subjective.

Many things have become 'home' for me. My childhood home is gone but the time and the people I grew with are still there, in reality and in memory. There are new friends who have quickly grown into familar old friends who become another home to me; there are the places I have loved and still love, and oddly enough, the taste of a nice red wine can also inspire something akin to a sensation of homecoming. Airport departure lounges, Singapore on a break between flights, the cabin of the big jet taking me home, taking me someplace new; the journey ... all are familiar.

Home: a smell, a taste, a sound, a person, a place, a time ... different things for different people I think.