A Home In The World
My mother’s recent move into a retirement community took some adjustment on everybody’s part. She had been a widow for seven and a half years. A life in the big house where she raised her family was proving expensive. Her children were scattered, geographically and ideologically, in different stages of their own lives. The house where most of us grew up was drained of all the tangible things that represented something to those of us who were interested. As the doors to that house were closed, so too was that part of our lives.
Hanging on to the sentimentality of a Norman Rockwell New England homestead serves no good purpose. This is easy to understand. We can’t go over the river and through the woods to Grandmother’s house anymore because she can’t keep up with the Property Taxes and snow plow bills. The furnace is shot. The landscapers are unreliable, and the painters just broke your new storm window. It’s time to cut losses and head into the future with new surroundings.
The time comes for all of us when the home we knew for many years reverts to the condition it had always held; house. Don’t get misty-eyed about crackling fires in the fireplace and marks on the door where you charted your children’s growth. It can vanish in an instant. What was once a determination to stay rooted forever in one house, make it a home, raise your kids and pass the dwelling down to your grandchildren is no longer cost efficient. Property values, gentrification, and the lure of hitting the road have made hanging on to the past the last resort of the foolish and unrealistic.
My parent’s generation knew how to plant roots and settle into a groove rather than compromise most of their principles for the next best thing. I grew up in a town of big families and quaint houses. Our fathers went to work at General Electric or the blossoming software companies on Rte. 128, and our mothers turned these houses into homes. Our own generation either stayed within a convenient driving distance of the home where we grew up, or we went far away. The world we had inherited was too exciting and expensive for us to stay in one place.
It can get frightening as the years and decades roll on and you have yet to settle down. Societal expectations steer you towards finding something you can define as family, and then buying a home. I pay a competitive rent, nothing included, for a two bedroom place near the city whose only assets are storage space and immediate public transportation access. Part-time work at several jobs has proven steady, but nothing is guaranteed. Am I scared? No. Am I worried? Of course. Mine is a stressful but manageable life, and I shouldn’t complain. Home is not where I am now, but where I’ll end up at the end of the road.