Y for Yearning

When my daughter, Kate, was young, she would beg to go spend time in Hope with her grandparents. On many Friday evenings, Charlie and I would meet Mom and Dad halfway, at the “Scottsburger” exit on I-65, and off she would go for a weekend visit. 

Around bedtime, the call would come.  “I want to come home.” Then, when she would come home on Sunday evening, she would want to be back in Hope.  The proverbial wish to have your cake and eat it, too. Impossible, my little darling.

Oh, the yearnings of youth.  Some of which remain for a lifetime.  And the beginning of a new year is a time for reflection on such things.  Well, that, and the fact that I’m home alone for eight days while Charlie is away on a business trip.  Me with too much time on my hands can be an interesting thing.

I have been yearning of late.  For home.  Except I’m not sure where or what that is.  It was ten years last November that we’ve lived outside the US.  In a few months, we’ll start our ninth year of residence here in Singapore.  When we left the US, Tennessee was our point of departure and had been home for about two years.  Prior to that, we had an Arizona postal code.  Before that, we’d had brief stays in Wisconsin, Kentucky, Kansas. 

Ever since Adam and Eve were sent away from Eden it seems the human condition has been one of a deep longing to go back home.  Think of the songs.

Home, home on the range, where the deer and the antelope play

.

Take, take me home, cause I don’t remember…

Our house in the middle of our street…

Homeward bound…I wish I was homeward bound…

Please celebrate me home. Play me one more song

that I’ll always remember and I can recall

whenever I find myself all too alone

I can sing me home

I’ll be home for Christmas…if only in my dreams.

Take me home, country roads.

The yearning is palpable in these tunes. So what is home?  It’s more than geography, more than brick and mortars, a floorplan or furnishings. It’s a dream, a vision, a feeling, a hope, a yearning. Home is something internal, something we carry with us wherever we go.  It may sound a bit cheesy, but home is where the heart is.  And that’s not a spot that Google can map. 

I guess each of us decides for ourselves and makes our own home.  And we know it when we find it.  And there’s no place like it.