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Friday Fun: A Place We Once Called Home

This is something I wrote a long time ago, on a very different blog.

My whole life seems to consist of being really happy in some wonderful places – and then having to tear myself away from them. I love exploring new places but I also like settling in, making those places my own, getting that intimate connection with them that can only come from repetition and routine. When it’s time to move on, I am excited about the new adventures I will have, but I am also sad to leave a certain part of myself behind. With each encounter with a different country and culture, I become richer in experience, but somehow also poorer when I leave.

It’s difficult to explain – but it’s like my soul has been bereft to a certain extent. I keep the experience locked up somewhere tight within and remember it with such delight from time to time. But the experience is unrepeatable. Even if I go back to that country, it will never feel the same again. If you go back as a tourist to a country where you were once resident, it can be exhilarating as long as you don’t think about it too closely. Or you can feel shut out, a stranger once more. It will certainly never again feel like home.

Last week, I had the opportunity to return to our village in France and took some pictures to try and describe the charm of the location (bearing in mind that these pictures do not cover all the seasons, only a sunny day in February).

Our home in France for 4 1/2 years. — Our home in France for 4 1/2 years, complete with climbing tree for Zoe cat.

The field we passed on our walk to school, often full of ponys grazing.

The orchard where we could pick plums, apples, pears and quince.

'We live in the countryside,' my boys used to tell visitors, 'You will smell a lot of natural fertiliser.' — ‘We live in the countryside,’ my boys used to tell visitors, ‘You will smell a lot of natural fertiliser.’

The view facing the other way, towards the Alps.

‘Tis the Season to be Cosy

A smoggy, sunless day today.

So indulge me… Allow me to curl up in a well-travelled vintage room, with lots of books, armchairs, plaid blankets and plenty of cushions. An open fire and a mulled wine would be optional, but deliciously thoughtful.

A cosy bedroom would not come amiss, even if it were designed with teenagers in mind…

But, for the ultimate retreat, while there is still snow in the mountains, I would like to hide up in this Swiss eco-pod hut in Flims and do nothing but read and write.

Running Home

The mountains are closing in today.

On a clear day, just after a drop in temperature, they open up as endless as your life seems in childhood. On a day like this, when clouds display a full arsenal of grays, when rain is announced every few minutes, the mountains seem closer. Too close. They press against you, crush you, lock you in. You begin to understand the danger of the Alps. Ominous is a word created for that brief silence before the storm breaks.

So you start running. Mud, pebbles, asphalt: the terrain varies and so do your steps. What you cannot get used to is the running between borders. After a lifetime of being punished for your nationality, of not being allowed in or out of countries, it is such a thrill to be able to weave your way in and out of France and Switzerland. A grey, moss-covered border stone dating from the 1870s is your only witness.

You moved to the area unwillingly the first time round. You had to give up a good job, family and friends, a good-sized house in the process of being slowly renovated, the language of your comfort. The children were fully dependent on you that first time, each day was a struggle with unfamiliarity. You couldn’t wait to get back ‘home’.

But home had moved on, as had you. You found yourself struggling to fit in. You were still the alien, perhaps even more so with your new-found love for croissants and small coffees. You missed the extreme landscapes, the seasons. You remembered breathing in air so fresh that it rushed straight to your lungs in unadulterated delight.

Life has a way of playing with your emotions. Just when you are settled in again, when you have arranged your memories in a neatly labelled box to be put up in the attic, it is time to resurrect them. You are going back to the space on the border for a second time. But this time it’s all different again. The children are older, your French is better. You continue working, but you are determined to make each minute in this wonderful location count. You are not going to leave this area again, regretting all that you didn’t do and see.

Home is a word you have bandied about far too often in your existence. You’ve believed you were at home in many places, with many people, but have you ever fully understood it?

Could this be home now? You hardly dare to hope.

Yet there is a lilt in your peasant soul as you run through the fields, worrying about the harvest.

The peaks and valleys, now green and pleasant, now eerily bare, mirror your own innerscapes. You surprise yourself with the sudden onset of storms, but you recognise a twin spirit.

If you weren’t so marked by years of taunting, you might almost think you are communing with nature.

Whether this is home or not, this is the best of you. Use this time wisely. Write it all down.

Born Out of Place

W. Somerset Maugham has a beautiful quote, which I think describes so well the feelings of us global nomads, who are never fully at home anywhere, but also easily at home anywhere.

I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Accident has cast them amid strangers in their birthplace, and the leafy lanes they have known from childhood or the populous streets in which they have played, remain but a place of passage. They may spend their whole lives aliens among their kindred and remain aloof among they only scenes they have ever known. Perhaps it is this sense of strangeness that sends men far and wide in the search for something permanent, to which they may attach themselves… Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. Her is the home he sought, and he will settle amid scenes that he has never seen before, among men he has never known, as though they were familiar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest.

And here are two more quotes about that exquisite tension between ‘home is where your heart is’ and ‘but my heart is in several places at once’.

I feel like I’ve never had a home. I feel related to that country, to this country, and yet I don’t know exactly where I fit in… There’s always this kind of nostalgia for a place, a place where you can reckon with yourself. (Sam Shepard)

The ache for home lives in all of us. The safe place where we can go as we are and not to be questioned. (Maya Angelou)

Perhaps that is why I enjoy fiction set in different locations so much. I’m exploring potential homes.

How we travel with books (desfischersauge.wordpress.com)
The Great Tragedy of Life Is Not that Men Perish, but that They Cease to Love (jrbenjamin.com)

You Can Never Go Home

In the country where my tongue

should feel limber,

my mind goes slurry.

I hear the gasps between words,

feel the teeth in the smiles.

In the land of sensuous beauty,

I spy abandon, breathe in decay.

I opt for potholes while above

a sky of such wonder

casts up its blue tablecloth of hospitality,

flecked with golden smudges.

A generous hostess.

I groan in over-fed wantonness.

In the soft arms of my mother land

I detect only flab.

Since when did cynicism poison my well and render

my cattle so sick?

How did love grow so shallow that mere breezes

can topple the ship of my faith?

I don’t believe they care much about my grimace,

or ruefully take in my artful sneers.

They live each day anew, alight

in flames I can no longer name.

I shiver unburnt.

And in the thirst

for life of my people I am humbled

out of the girth of my own navel.

Holiday Haikus

Silver mother-tongue:

winter nights are still too short

to share you with friends.

If you must pass too:

let the murmur of the snow

be your only guide.

Our Falcon-hut

hugs its icy green mantle

closer to its heart.

Shrill squawks of delight

our boys, your boys: who can tell?

Bundled-up snowmen.

If laughter ceases,

what is left? Bring more mulled wine!

Games room rings with us.

Inside the prison,

outside of the storm,

I am laughing.

Finding Myself

Who enters the day with tongue too curious?

What enters the mind in bewilderment’s sway?

Head-first the plunge

into waters unplumbed:

do I know myself? No more!

No more

I say.

Thin peel by thin

I unwrap the onion

of my soul too shivery

of a layer too deep.

I choose to believe

I will it to be

the rawness

making me cry.

And what would you say,

what would you whisper,

what would you shout

if you could?

If you woke each day in love

without fear

in a cocoon some call home.

Not sure I am doing this properly, but I am trying to link this to the OpenLinkNight at virtual pub dVersePoets, a rather amazing website and initiative which enables me to read poems by some of the most interesting voices that the online world has to offer.

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