Home Sweet Home

I live in a place where people mostly live in houses, not apartments. Many have lived in the same neighborhood, not just town or city, for generations. Most people live with another or several others. I live alone. It's the kind of place where when I tell people I lived somewhere else, they ask if I “moved back.” I didn't. Minute differences are acutely observed here. A neighbor remarked upon the fact that I use my front door and not my back to enter and exit. Gardens, local sports teams and restaurants that closed two decades ago are subjects of lively discussion. Sometimes I feel a little lost, a little off kilter. I come from a city with millions of inhabitants, large apartment buildings and, a lively, loud, but friendly street life (New York City) and lived for nine years in a charming,beautiful much more formal one (Paris). You can be ignored in both and I miss a sense of discovery, anonymity and bigness.

In times of personal turmoil and chaos, when my daily assumptions were shattered, or even when I just needed to refresh myself, I would go for long walks in both and lose myself in new streets and unknown faces.

I remember back before SOHO in Manhattan was SOHO, my boyfriend and I used to go down  there occasionally to visit our friends Tony,an artist, and his wife Hatsie in their loft  apartment in a former warehouse. We'd play poker with a loose knit group of friends.  They were like homesteaders on the frontier surrounded by warehouses.  The warehouses were empty and untended looking against the night sky, seeming to lack any context. An Italian bakery was the only homey thing in sight.  Even then, I found the strange, unsettling skyscape somehow soothing and comforting, as if it spoke to something in my soul.

And when I lived in Paris, I'd sometimes get off at unknown metro stations in unfamiliar neighborhoods, sometimes in immigrant areas with North African accented French and see spice and garment stores where I knew the names and uses of nothing and loved being wrapped up briefly in another world.

And now, here I am in a place that lends itself more to discovery by car than on foot, and where so much is different from what I've been used to.  And so, I have adapted. At first, when I was in turmoil or in need of refreshment, I didn't know what to do. But I have found a solution. I have discovered a parallel to the soothing, walks I used to take on crowded streets of strangers.

Here, I take a ride. It needs to be far, past suburbs to small towns and hamlets onto 55 mile an hour two lane roads with simple, clapboard houses standing by the roadside. And then,  in isolated hamlets and onlittle used roads, I feel at peace. It's the same kind of peace I used to feel when I walked unexpected streets in New York or Paris and saw rundown warehouses or stores with foreign writing selling things I'd never seen before. And then I can come home and feel it it really might be home. And that feels good.