Finding our way home

On revisiting the places we've called home.

This isn't a structure "out there" on a dirt road in southern Ontario; this is the house in me.

—James K. A. Smith, How To Inhabit Time

Maybe it’s because these past weeks have been about clearing my parents’ house that all things home and rootedness have been uppermost in my mind.

In the funny, strange way that it happens, I keep coming across the most beautiful words about home (in books, on podcasts and right here on Substack).

Clearing a parents’ house brings with it a particular kind of grief, I’ve learned—even with the blessing of still having both of mine here, in the residential home where my mother receives the kind, specialist care she needs, and my father can be with her.

In some ways, it’s felt sudden and disorientatingly fast; in others, peeling-off-a-plaster slow and drawn out.

I know it has to do with acceptance.

With methodically sifting through the years and, in stages, getting the task done, comes the unavoidable reality: they’re never going to go back.

Until this point, there was always the possibility. Even though I knew there really wasn't.

Everyone who knows and loves them has told me so, all along. But it’s still something to think that I’ll never again rush to rap on the rusting brass knocker, hear the TV up at full volume on the other side of the door and wait for my dad to gingerly open and peek around it, my mother hovering in the hallway, close behind.

After I wrote last time about finding a few cherished Christmas decorations in my parents’ garage, some have asked if it was the house I grew up in. The answer is no. But the things that made it their home I remember first being in my childhood home, the white house with bay windows on the corner of a leafy, residential avenue in south west London.

The one I remember when I dream of my childhood.

In his latest book, How To Inhabit Time: Understanding the Past, Facing the Future, Living Faithfully Now, James K. A. Smith describes something a college counsellor asked him to do when Smith had sought help during a hard period. The exercise was to draw a map of his childhood home.

I'm drawing a map but inhabiting a history. This looks like cartography but is actually archaeology … this floor plan is a timeline … I can draw this house with my eyes closed. I am mapping every windowsill, picturing closets, placing the furniture, recalling the way light settled on the sunken living room …

This is a map of the field of dreams that was my childhood
until it wasn’t.

—James K. A. Smith

Working my way through my parents’ belongings, various scenes flashed by of the rooms, upholstery and colours I remember from my childhood home.

As I’ve told friends since, it was the little things that undid me. During the initial sweep, it was removing old meds and tissues on the bedside table where the small, fold-out travel alarm clock had stopped its gentle tick-ticking.

Who knew an abandoned packet of paracetamol could pack such a sucker punch?

In the corner of one room, we found the navy blue canvas travel bag that my dad always took on family holidays. In a dresser drawer, a set of cork coasters my mother laid drinks on in our best glasses at Seventies/Eighties gatherings.

In my dad’s office, I found hidden treasure: the old grey fountain pen he kept it on his desk in the small room overlooking the front garden of my childhood home, which smelled of pipe tobacco and Polo mints (they’d helped him to successfully kick the habit).

I rolled the pen I’d always admired, but was never allowed to use, between my fingers. But I couldn’t bring myself to test it.

For anyone on a similar journey or who can see it coming on the horizon (SO very much love, if this is you), I have to say that giving whatever you can to wonderful causes—a local furniture bank for families in need, as well as charitable donations—has been hugely helpful for me, personally. To know that items that have been loved will be loved again, by those in need or by someone who has been looking for that very obscure thing—maybe because it brings back memories of their own—brings a deep, unexpected kind of comfort that I wouldn’t have credited.

The night before the clearance vans came, I didn’t even try to hold back tears as Will and I worked out if the stereo was still functioning, and decided whether or not to keep the vintage Scrabble game we found left in a dresser cupboard.

I didn’t.

I wish I had.

That’s something else I’ve learned: there will always be regrets. I’m trying hard to allow myself to feel them, and then let them go. I wish someone had warned me about this, so I hope that by writing this, it might help someone, in a small way.

Echoing James K. A. Smith’s words, my friend Jess said, “You may not be able to physically go back to your parents’ home, but you can always go back there in your mind”. She prayed that I’d remember that and I have, ever since.

Dancing in my childhood bedroom
Falling right back into the way it was
Dancing like I never get to
Step into my mind, and suddenly, I'm
Barefoot on my dark blue carpet
Temporary freedom within these walls

—Ben Platt, Childhood Bedroom

Several years back, taking a detour on a family trip to drive past the home I grew up in, I was surprised by how much and how little had changed.

You can see what was my dad’s office, at the first floor window.

The front door and black wrought iron gate remained the same.

But the back garden, the setting of endless hot summers, barbecues and birthday parties, seemed so much smaller. A conservatory had been built onto the dining room.

Old but new. Familiar, yet different.

I love these words by

Lore Wilbert

in her piece, Here I Am, at her Substack, SAYABLE, a few weeks back.

I suppose it would be like if your childhood home was picked up and moved to a new city. Within its walls you’d feel at home, but through its windows and out its door, it all feels very strange and new and odd …

And I suppose that you would need to feel your hands and look at your face in the mirror and perhaps weigh yourself or sit on a familiar piece of furniture or cook a familiar meal or wake up in your bed, something tangible to remind you that you are you and this is home and it’s going to be okay.

—Lore Wilbert

With this time navigating a new ‘bend in the road’ with my parents (my friend Jess, again) has come the realisation that the memories we make in bricks and mortar buildings, inside their walls with loved ones still here or not, stay with us.

And it’s going to be okay.