My Life as a Migrant

I have been working on a screenplay about immigrants, which has made me think a lot about the idea of home.

 I remember the Robert Frost poem. “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,

They have to take you in.”  Warren says this in “The Death of the Hired Hand.”

Or the character George Webber who realizes, "You can't go back home to your family, back home to your childhood ... back home to a young man's dreams of glory and of fame ... back home to places in the country, back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time — back home to the escapes of Time and Memory." This is from Thomas Wolf’s You Can’t Go Home Again.

For me home was never one place.

Some people have a house, a town, a region, which for them is  home. Possibly a place they lived in from birth through high school. Perhaps a place their parents lived in after that—a place where they could return to on school breaks, or after they’d graduated from college.

I never had that. A home. A house where you thought of and it embodied all your memories of childhood and adolescence.

A town where you could say you were from.

My father was an itinerant worker. He didn’t work in fields. Rather, he labored in what he would have seen as a mission field. A place where there were unchurched people who needed to care of a pastor and a God. And he was soon off to the next town, the next church.

I remember the last night I spent in the house I’d lived in through all of high school (a long stay for our family). Just seventeen, I was off the college in Chicago.

House on Lilibridge Rd.

And my last night was spent cocooned in a sleeping bag in an empty house. My parents had sold the house, packed up and left the day before I was to leave. Clearly, that was not home, the place I had lived longest in my life. It was not a place I would return to.

That migrant-like existence continued for me. Through college. Then young adulthood. My then husband was a person who was always looking for a geographical fix for problems. So we moved every year.

At one point in my early 30s, I realized I had lived in as many places as I had lived years.

That changed when I took control of my life.  Maybe that  itch to move still stays with me. I don’t move from house to house, state to state. Instead, I move whole rooms around. Guests are never sure in which room they will find the dining table and chairs. And I move desk and computers based on the project I am working on and what room feels best for it.

Maybe I am a seedling that never formed deep roots, and could always be transplanted.

I have a little twinge when I ride through the gentle hills of Pennsylvania and New York state. That geography feels like home. But then the feeling goes.

Where is home?

I learned when I was growing up that it wasn’t Princeton, Perth, Perkasie, or Portville. Even though I did live in each of those towns.

Where is home?

Home is where I am.

But I’m wondering, where or what is home for you?