A Sense Of Home

Martha Wiseman

Photo by Anne Day

Word Count 1031

When I was a child, I thought I wanted to live on a farm. I’d never been on a farm, but I loved animals, and I thought living on a farm meant being surrounded by gentle animals who’d be my constant companions. I also wanted siblings. I guess I needed company besides my depressed mother. Maybe I had a hunch, one I couldn’t have articulated, that a sister would buffer the unboundaried bond between my mother and me.

I say sometimes that I grew up in Chapel Hill, but the truth is that I lived with my mother in Chapel Hill for only five years. Even then, we lived in three different places. There was never a mansion or a hut or something in between to which I could point and say, I grew up here. On vacation from school, I couldn’t say, I’m going home, unless I meant it figuratively. My father and his wife did live in one place for more than forty years, until their deaths. But that apartment in New York City was full of shouting and competitiveness and drama. Except in a very short-lived fantasy of mine, it was not comfortable, not welcoming. Not home.

When I’m asked where I’m from, I grow a bit tongue-tied. I say, I don’t know or, It’s complicated. Sometimes I go through an abbreviated version of my history: first here, then there, then there, then somewhere else..... My husband has gently remonstrated with me: When you say, I don’t know, it’s complicated, you’re angling for a chance to pique others’ interest and recite the complications. Maybe they were just making conversation, and they might not be that interested. You might even be making them uncomfortable, maybe they think your story is too painful for you to go into. You could just come up with a simple answer, right?

Well, right. Let’s see: North, South, North again.

Friends have considered me a New Yorker. Others think of me as a Southerner. I admit I can take on whichever background suits at the moment. I can even do the voices. Where I’m from: I’m from a hard-to-imagine marriage of a Northerner and a Southerner. I have collaged myself, as ultimately I think so many of us must.

*

I did not feel at home in my body for a long time, despite a brief career as a dancer and sixteen years of living with my first husband. I whittled my body down to extreme thinness and still felt at odds with it. Even when I was dancing, my body was pointedly tight and tense, in my mind unsupple and unresilient.

In my late sixties now, I try to make peace with a plumper, new-shaped body. I look down and see a mound of abdomen where ten or fifteen years ago, there was a flat belly (and, eons before that, a scooped-out hollow). I think, foolishly, How can this be? I could be thin again, couldn’t I? And then, pretty quickly, I settle into my flesh, blink away thoughts of another body I don’t have.

I will, of course, go through this loop again.

*

Once, I did try to burrow in, inhabiting only one apartment in New York for eighteen years—those sixteen years with my former husband and then two years alone. But I was all that time just perching. He and I together were just perching. No matter what improvements we attempted (I pretty much gave up once I was alone), there was no true nesting, no full settling in. I eventually understood that I would never be at home in New York.

Several skins had to be shed. (Even that metaphor is uncomfortable. Overused. A bad fit, so to speak. I must wriggle out and find other words to both pass through and inhabit.)

*

When I first discovered Dwell magazine, I’d never heard of “shelter porn.” I hadn’t even heard the term “shelter magazines.” Homesick for what I could imagine but couldn’t yet have or create, I pored over issue after issue. One of my friends subscribed, and when I visited, I would grab a pile of the magazines, as if a ten-course meal had been laid before me, and gaze hungrily at the pages, the beautiful and inventive structures, the rooms open and spare, the vivid, cradling gardens.

Unbelievably, I do now live in a house, a lovely house. Yet since my current husband (new, for the last twenty-five years) installed a news app on my Ipad, I find myself scrolling to all the house and garden candy. I take ridiculous, self-congratulatory pleasure in noting the bad taste some homeowners display: I would never live with that plaid wallpaper or rush off to buy the “Twenty Things You Can’t Afford Not to Buy from Amazon Right Now.” I skim the columns on how to clean, declutter, organize, refresh. And I am tempted always by photographs of home libraries, despite having one of my own.

Greedy, I must be. But grateful, too

*

I am sitting on the deck of my house. Our house. My first ever, my husband’s first ever. A house full of windows and light and books. Here I am, in the almost-spring air, with birdsong tuned and turned up, the sun warming my face against the lingering chill of late winter. I will go back inside soon, and I’ll be greeted.

I want to die here—eventually.

I’m home.

Martha grew up in both New York and North Carolina. She studied acting, had a brief career as a dancer and choreographer, and worked as an editor. She retired in 2020 from her position teaching literature and writing in the English Department and running the writing center at Skidmore College.