All that you can't leave behind
Friday September 12, 2003 - Permanent link to this post -
This weekend I'll be helping my parents move house. Since myself and my brother have both left home and moved away (although my brother hasn't officially moved away, he just globe-trots for the majority of the year), they've seized the opportunity to get out of an ever-so-slowly declining area while the goings reasonable and find somewhere a bit nicer/further out of town to hang their hats.
So far, unfortunately, they've not found an appropriate hatstand, and so will be spending the next few months living in a rented holiday-home, owned by a business associate, in a picturesque Yorkshire village. The disappointment of not being able to find a place of their own straight away will I'm sure be lessened by the fact that this holiday home has it's own bar and snooker table. I can see my visits home becoming more frequent in the near future.
You may or may not have noticed that I ended the last paragraph referring to my parent's new residence as my home. It's not, of course. I've been living in a different city with my wife now for over two years, and before that I was at university for three years. I haven't lived at 'home' for quite some time. And now my old home, my family home has been sold and is empty all but a couple of brown boxes waited to be loaded into a van.
So what is 'home'? I consider my house in York to be home. It's where I hang my hat, lay my head and pay my mortgage. But whenever I go to see my parents, or we drive South to see my wife's, we're going to our respective homes for the weekend. You grow up, finish school, get a job and leave home, don't you? Or do you just get another home? An extra home? If that's the case then home would be everywhere you've ever stayed for a while. That can't be right.
When I popped round to my parent's house on Tuesday I went upstairs to pick some things up from my old bedroom. It turned into a scene from a bad soap opera. I stood for about three minutes in an empty room with no furniture, visualising scenes from my childhood. Playing football and rugby with mattresses strewn across the floor when my cousin, Paul would come round to babysit; racing Scalextric with my brother, James; studying for my GCSE's; having band practices that almost had the neighbours in tears (and this was a detached house). It all came flooding back.
This melancholic moment made me realise what home is. Home is where the important stuff happens: now, then and in the future.
