Recap of 6th Living Out Loud project: Going home

I'm super pleased with the participation on this month's project themed on Going Home! As always, it's a joy to read about all your histories and ideas. So let's see what you all have wrought: Sarah's I have found me a home NOTE: I forgot to include this in my first rendition of this recap. Sorry, Sarah! I blame pregnancy brain. I was friends with a guy in high school whose parents were divorced and it always seem strange to me that he had "his Mom's" and "his Dad's" but nothing was necessarily Home. But in a lot of ways it's like having two homes, kind of like I have now as an adult.

Gina's Where is Home??? I always forget that Gina is from my relative neck of the woods originally, but more importantly spending even just a few minutes around her it's obvious how much her personal version of Home means to her. And thankfully, they're pretty portable.

Jen's Home is where the spark is ... The fireflies really got to me. In all my travels back and forth to Richmond, nothing beat that feeling of pulling up into the driveway and knowing you were about to be Home.

Jessica's Living Out Loud - Going Home Having been to her parents' home and seeing what it's like out there, I can see how it would give off strong feelings. I wouldn't want to be a teenager there, but I'd always love coming back to it as an adult.

Deb's So, where you from? I like how she explains where she's from as not a place but a frame of mind. Also interesting in that Keilyn and I were just chatting recently about the idea of being more "free range" as kids. Lots of food for thought here.

Collette's Nostalgia is a wonderful place to visit but no place to live Hooray, a guest post! I love getting these because it means the project compelled someone to write something that they weren't even sure where they'd put it, but it needed to be said. And I fascinated by most of the foods and drinks she listed, having never had any of them.

Kim's Living Out Loud Project: Home First, I love the look on Jack's face in that photo. And I can totally commiserate with the idea of having two homes, I just solved mine by putting them spitting distance from each other.

Rich's Home One day we'll go back to Germany together. And I'm eternally grateful that he agreed to come to me and leave his family behind.

Karal's Going home. This made me realize how spoiled I am to still have the freedom to visit every home I've had as a child. In may ways, though, home is just what you make of it and as she says you get to pick and choose what you take with you.

Megan's I wrote my name on the wall Oh my god, all the great old photos! Having spent most of the weekend sorting and scanning relics myself, I love looking at others.

Travis' Home (He tried to sneak this in and not submit it, but I'm adding it after the fact because it's awesome.) So fascinating that each of his examples, save maybe the last one is not something you'd immediately think of quilting into a blanket to depict home. But wow, what an awesome blanket this would make.

And my own OV and me

Interestingly, this project taught me that I have so many stories to tell that it's hard to put them all in one entry. I want to tell you about my Daddy's farm, about the beach houses where my mother lived where her brother slept in a closet so small his feet stuck out the door, about the decision to build onto our first house and keep it once we still bought a much bigger house, and about the struggles of choosing a home for ourselves and making it ours. So look for all of that soon.

As a note, I hope I got all the entries since a few folks wrote them but didn't send me an email with the link. If I missed your entry, just let me know and I'll add it here! I'm super excited that we had three new participants this month who all join the esteemed ranks of LOLers.

It was tough to pick a winner this month with so many quality entries. But I have a soft spot in my heart for guest posts, so I'm declaring Collette our winner! Collette will receive a collection of Sanders sundae toppings, for the nostalgia of it all.

Thank you again, for all of your support and enthusiasm for this ongoing project. I hope you all enjoy reading these trips down memory lane and that they've given you food for thought on what is important to you in a happy home.

On a related note, I'm pleased to say I've been asked to co-present one of the Room Of Your Own sessions at BlogHer conference this year titled Realllly personal blogging, how much info is TMI? with the talented Miss Britt and Terra. I'm really looking forward to it and am curious what others will have to say in the session as well.

And stay tuned for the theme for our next LOL Project!

OV and me

A few days ago, I went by my parents to visit and coincidentally my mother had uncovered a box of old photos. Since several photos were literal snapshots into my family over the years, I took a few of them to my therapy appointment to show Gary. I reminded him that my father and his family are all from Edgecombe County in North Carolina on a road that bears their last name since everyone living on it was from our family. He looked at the portrait of my mother from 1967 and said, "where is your mother from?" Me: "Oh, she's from Ocean View." Gary: "No, but where is her family from?" Me: "Well, she was born in Raleigh I think, but they all moved to Ocean View when she was really little." Gary: "No, before that. She looks a little Mediterranean." Me: "Oh! I have no idea. I'm not good at genealogy. She's from where we live now."

My father was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and lived on the same farm his whole childhood, one with its own family graveyard. Recently, though, he and Mom talked about picking a plot out over on Granby Street, just a few miles from where we are now.

As for me, there is definitely a very small radius of real estate that I call home. I'm irrationally dedicated to this neighborhood. I had been living across the state in Christiansburg, married and with a full-time job, when we drove back to Norfolk for a visit. I had the window down as we came out of the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel and when the salt air hit me I suddenly realized that I was home. I wish I could bottle up that smell to share with you.

On the day I told Jeremy our marriage was over, I handed back my wedding rings and drove home. I stayed in a rental property of my parents, sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor, but I was back in the neighborhood where I rode my bike as a kid. I spent a lot of time walking up and down the beach then (since I was only a block from it) and came to realize how much I needed to be near the water.

Soon after that, I moved to another rental property that I eventually bought from my parents. Rich and I had many discussions while he was living many miles away in Richmond as to who would move for us to share an address, but I think we both knew that the further I was from Ocean View, the harder it would be on me. I come by this irrational behavior naturally. When Rich and I talked about moving to the next neighborhood over (a whopping four miles away), my mother lamented "I don't know why you have to go so far." So of course when Rich and I shopped for a larger home than our original house together, I would lament that certain houses we saw while walking the dog were "too far."

Rich: "You realize we got here on foot from our current house?" Me: "Yeah, but it's too far. I can't walk to the water or my parents' house from here."

That said, I consider any space I share with Rich to be Home, wherever it is. He was gone all day yesterday and I spent most of my day either doing laundry or moping about the house waiting for him to come home. Where do I feel safe and content? Wherever Rich is.

But where am I from? I'm from a part of the coast that is cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter than other cities inland. I'm from a shoreline protected by the Chesapeake Bay, so the water is perfect for learning to swim in the summer. I'm from a neighborhood where live oaks twist into shapes like giant bonsai trees and create so much shade that they make "clean swept yards" of sand and tiny acorns. I live just far enough away from the water to not have to buy flood insurance but to still put sheets of plywood over our windows when a hurricane comes.

Our local grocery store is equally frequented by poor families and yuppies, and there are nearly as many rainbow flags as American flags on front porches. This area was the place to be in the 40s and 50s, a place to avoid in the 80s, and is slowly turning back into the place to be again now. But some of us have been here all along.

We've learned to swim in these waters, learned to rollerskate on these sidewalks, frequented every single 7-Eleven available to us, practiced driving a stick shift on the dead end roads near the inlets and struggled to peddle our bikes up the hills of the Bay streets. And with a baby on the way, I look forward to creating another "OV lifer." I still can't quite bear to get one of those "OV before it was cool" bumper stickers, though.

Guest Post: Nostalgia is a wonderful place to visit but no place to live

I was pleasantly surprised to see an email Friday from Collette submitting her entry for our sixth Living Out Loud project. Feel free to comment on this entry here so that she can review them and reply at her leisure.

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As a Michigander born and bred when someone asks me where I’m from I hold up my hand, thumb out and use my five-fingered map. The spot I point to is on the border between Birmingham and Troy—house in Birmingham, front yard in Troy. Back then Birmingham had a reputation of being a bunch of snooty types so my sisters and I told people we lived just outside of Troy. We grew up catching tad poles and crayfish in the pond at the end of the street and reading books as high up in the mulberry tree as we could climb. We had rail road tracks in our back yard and hid under the bridge to hear the echoing roar as the puffer bellies rolled past.

Like any native Michigander I learned to love Awreys Cookies, Saunders hot fudge sauce, Strohs ice cream and Vernor’s Ginger ale—even though the rest of the nation thought of it as carbonated kerosene. Summer meant baseball on WJR, Thanksgiving means watching the Lions lose whoever they were playing. I’ve walked the Mackinaw Bridge, watched the locks at the Sault and dipped my toes into all five of the Great Lakes.

While I’ve happily kept my claim to Michigan (Go Blue!) my professional life has moved me to Wisconsin, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana. Living in five states and changing street addresses thirteen times since leaving home I’ve seldom had time to grow deep roots so home is wherever my mother lives and my family gathers for Christmas to make a quilt for a homeless shelter and take a five-mile hike after dinner. With Mom almost 94 I wonder how long before I’m 'homeless'.

Nostalgia is a wonderful place to visit but no place to live. My future home will be on Maui. My friends and I have gone often enough that we’re often called on to give directions and make suggestions to the malihini (tourists). When they ask “do you live here?” we smile and say “not yet”.