Home is where?

Home is where?

We have a beautiful home. I have often looked at it and wondered how I would feel if it all the privilege of living here disappeared. Not because I was weirdly perverse but because I have never wanted to be to defined by what I have. So now how do I feel that my question to myself is being fulfilled?

Creeping up on us stealthily at first but now like a rushing wind we find ourselves preparing to leave West Hayes in 3 weeks. We have agreed a let and we are visiting the dump the Hospice shop, posting on Freecycle and ‘donating’ to friends and family at an increasingly frenzied rate. We only want to store what we can fit into the attic and everything else MUST go.

So what is it like to get rid of your ‘stuff’? People tell me it will be liberating but I’m not sure I have the time to acknowledge that yet. The only things I have really minded giving away are my tennis racquet (odd but true as I cannot even play now that my shoulder objects) and my metalwork crested cranes from the bed near the kitchen window. They had clouds of tarragon for company in the summer and frosted crowns in winter. It helps they have gone to a loving home where they will be given regular varnish to keep the rust at bay.

Last week I started wrapping and packing our pictures that are going to be stored in the attic. The stack of boxes is growing and the bubble wrap is reducing but as the bubble wrap began to disappear I began to feel a terrible sense of desolation.

Why am I so sad about putting away things that I will see again and which I still own, and seem to be unscathed by the loss of so much else that is no longer mine?

What makes a home special then? For me it seems to be tied up with things that commemorate shared experience and shared memory and things that give us a place to feel safe and where belonging does not require achievement. Perhaps this will in the end be a good way of helping me to look forward to making home when we finally arrive.

So can I deal with continuing to wrench it all apart? I hope so, and the pictures should still be there if I can ever managed to unwrap them!

Caroline