Home. Home is a place where you can be yourself. Home is a place where you feel safe, at peace with yourself, or at peace with the world at large. Home is where you can control what is happening in the world around you with the click of a button, flip of a switch, or even with a simple change of clothes. Home is where, at the worst of times, you can hold someone and have them remind you that life is not horrible. Home is where the heart is and, when least expected, found again and again in the tiniest of things. Home is the island in the storm that is life. The smallest of occurrences or coincidences can invoke the feelings of home, a whiff of perfume that reminds you of your mother, a glinting sunbeam off of some newly rained-on grass, some innocuous sound that sparks some distant and long forgotten memory. Long drives for vacation and then the smell of the car, the people in the car, the snacks for the road, and everything in the car becomes overwhelming, unnerving. One step outside the car and into ‘Home’ and everything is ok, everything is alright once again, the world turns a little more and you are happy, content. Home is different for different people. Home is different even for members of the same family. Home is home.
I know I’m close to home when I’m driving down the road, sun or rain, and I travel a particular stretch. This little quarter mile piece of road has thick strands of trees on both sides. Since it is a smaller country road the trees have grown over the road and you can not tell where the branches of one tree end and the branches from the opposite side start. I have always called it ‘my tree tunnel’ and slow down a bit to enjoy an otherwise eventless drive home. Interestingly enough, I’ve heard the children call it a tunnel from time to time as well. I’m lucky because I have a tree tunnel in just about every direction from my house, so I have a little respite whichever way I’m coming from. On the bright days these trees offer me shade and the interesting shadows on the hood of my car, on rainy days I have a little shelter from the rain. These tree tunnels also have smells about them: the decaying leaves, the animals that have made homes in the foliage and underbrush, little streams that almost always run near these spots. Since the tree tunnels are in the country there is a muted feeling about them, the intrusive city sounds are no longer present and the simplest thing is now heard, such as the rattle of leaves or the braying of cows from neighboring farm lands.
I also know I am home when I catch the smallest of hints of a particular perfume. My wife hardly ever leaves the house without having something scented splashed on her. The perfume is nice; I like it, nothing that would assault the otherwise defenseless nose, something that reminds me of her. But that smell always reminds me of something else, some other smell that no manufacturer in the world could reproduce, the smell of my wife. I can hug her close to me, put my face in the crook of her neck, and just breath her in. I smell it on her hair, hands, wrists, back, everywhere. Poets and romanticists talk about drinking in a woman, this is what it must be because I can see myself drowning in this. I can run my fingers through her hair and hold the back of her head like she likes. She may think I’m trying to seduce her, massage her scalp, or comfort her in some shape or form. In truth there is usually a more selfish reason, I just love to smell her. Taste the slightly sweet, sometimes bitter after taste of her lips, gaze into her eyes, and get lost in her scent. Something interesting I’ve found out in the past 8 years, these scents are inheritable. The children smell slightly of Kristin. I can hold the children to me and smell their scalps and there she is; the wife I love is in the hair of my children. The stinky little things that annoy me so much, cause me heart ache and grief, are a piece of her.
My home, my place of comfort, my palace of solitude for actual feelings, can be found by simply traveling a country road and then holding my wife close and, for lack of poetic ingenuity, drink her in. Home is comfortable, home is here, and home is now.
