What We Call Home

Isn't life always the most penetrating preacher?

Depiction of the author.

There was a time when I lived a life of the senses.

Now, I live a life of the mind.

I see the living world, the world I used to inhabit, through the windshield of my car as I idle in traffic, fret about bills, rush off to work.

Houston. Photo credit: Houston Chronicle.

Nature in its broadest sense is reduced to birds on the graceful arc of a power line, each spaced so evenly apart, you wonder if they learn this skill or if it’s an ancient custom etched into their DNA.

My office at the law firm has three white walls. It smells like warm paper and coffee. I’ve tried to “personalize” it with John’s black-and-white photos of Manhattan, with pictures of my children and baby grandson, but on some deep level, these attempts feel like a mockery of my life as it used to be. Workplaces do not allow for interiority, or self-reflection, or personhood. You trade your freedom, your time, sometimes even your soul for health insurance and a steady paycheck—and you are obscenely grateful for the opportunity.

But after fourteen years of leading a Bohemian life, first in Italy and then in the East Village, with all its attendant indignities (digging change out of the couch cushions to buy a panino; stealing potatoes from a Nativity scene because we were too poor to eat), I am—strangely enough—not unhappy.

It’s true that the subordination of working within a corporate structure forces me to become an unrecognizable version of myself. When clients come into the office and assume I am the secretary or make liberal use of the “n” word, I sublimate my rage because I have to. But I am surrounded by family here in Houston. I have a beautiful old Craftsman bungalow apartment. John has a decent supply of drum students. I got a great deal on my sporty little Mazda Miata, due largely to the fact that no one in Houston drives stick.

And yet, I carry within me the memory of soft blue dawns in Umbria, of the yearning of tower bells calling out from the top of the hill. In my heart, I hold space for village coffee bars, bufala mozzarellas suspended in water, thousand-year-old churches with nobody in them. I remember the walks we took through wooded valleys, medieval villages, hidden courtyards, always with awe and the deepest reverence for the beauty I was lucky enough to see, but also sadness. I was in Europe; my family and friends were the U.S., a country that has shaped and defined me, but that I no longer recognized.

La Grande Bellezza: Italy.

That sadness never left me. It was always there, no matter how distractingly beautiful my surroundings. And yet, Italy was in my bloodstream. Because it drove me into myself, it felt more like home than any place I have ever lived, even Houston. Especially Houston. It forced me to embrace the oxymoronic reality that we can feel two equally strong and diametrically opposed emotions at the same time: great love and great sadness, operatic in scope. I longed for home but didn’t want to be there; Now I’m home, but I miss the self I left behind.

John and I have pieces of ourselves strewn across two continents. John’s 17^th and 18^th century ancestral oil paintings are in Italy, along with my books and his vinyls. We may have also emptied our storage unit in Manhattan, but things we couldn’t ship were abandoned or given away.

We are snails that carry their house on their backs.

No, we don’t belong here. I’m not sure we belong anywhere. We have wandered too long on foreign shores to feel rooted to one spot. But there is ease and familiarity in being back in our own culture, such as it is.

No one asks us about our life in Italy. I don’t believe anyone cares. Americans are a remarkably incurious lot. Italy is merely a vacation spot some of them once transited, but they have no frame of reference for the charm of a Padre Pio lithograph in an old stone kitchen or the rosemary smell of communist pizza parlors or funny church-adjacent pharmacy kiosks full of condoms and vibrators.

Italy.

You might think that John and I would speak of our shared history. Sometimes we do. But the grinding poverty of our time abroad, the inadequacies of public transportation, the cycle of boom-bust that characterizes all freelance work ….. These are the rightful province of the young. You can be young and poor, but being middle-aged and poor is so brutal, we try not to relive the experience any more than we have to.

Despite these adjustments, life here has its own beauties. We live in Midtown, one of the more artsy, vibrant parts of Houston. I have a sense of “belonging,” even if I don’t have a sense of home. I have my kids, my wonderful friends, the right to vote, and now my infant grandson, for whom I feel a tenderness so acute, it makes my heart ache.

One thing this Prodigal Daughter did learn is this: Home isn’t out there. Home is inside you, even when you’re at work staring at a computer screen. Home is love, and all of us are defined by the things and the people we love.

American life may be full of savagery (the politics, the traffic, the expense, the noise, the appalling disparity between rich and poor; the drugs, the mental illness, the grind), which are a shock to a system grown accustomed to the life of an Italian provincial—and re-adjusting to it comes at a cost—but I have been called to draw on what is surely my only strength. I adapt. I orient myself to what is best in others and what is best in my immediate surroundings.

NOT Italy.

My entire life has been characterized by decisions forced upon me by economic circumstances. From Pasadena, California (a definite boom) to Houston, Texas (a definite bust); from Italy to the East Village, and now back to Houston again, it has been a slog through Paradise, and a trek through Hell.

The relentless libertarianism of Houston in a single photo. Photo credit: John Arnold.

But I have fought my way through and survived it.

No matter what you’re going through right now, so will you.