Where Am I? Always at Home, Never Quite There

 

When you open the bedroom window on a fine May morning in Southern Norway, your senses will be overwhelmed by a strong blend of freshly cut grass and cow manure. That sweet-sour wave hitting your olfactory system throws you back into a faint childhood memory, with its pastures and free-roaming cattle, the pigs and chickens in the backyard, the sound of adults chitchatting about the daily chores. A random Saturday morning, when you were allowed to sleep in and daydream about the impending summer holiday. Here, the fields and pastures are at a distance, but the fragrance of fertilizers and the buzzing of lawnmowers are near, slowly awakening you. 

Smell and memory are adjacent in the brain's anatomy, so this involuntary trip down memory lane should not be surprising. You close your eyes and suddenly you are back to another summer day, when you were laying in the grass in your grandmother's vegetable garden, waiting for the grown-ups to finish planting corn, row by row, so that you could be fed. Bacon and green onions, freshly baked bread, juicy tomatoes. Then you remember that the first time you tasted a tomato bought at the farmer's market here in Stavanger, it took you right back to all those childhood summers, when you'd pick them right off the bushes, and eat them like fruit. They tasted exactly the same, very unlike the shiny, watery tomatoes one finds in the supermarkets across Western Europe. Infused with the value of arduous manual labour, the scent of organic manure, the dark moist soils of the Grannes region. It is all there, in the taste.  

We are fortunate enough to always carry these precious sensory anchors with us, wherever the journey of life might take us. Because in today's global labour market many of us are to some degree far away from where we were born and raised, removed and distanced from our core homes. Home is where the heart is, so the saying goes. It means that home is an internal emotional state not necessarily bound by a particular space. You make your own home, by surrounding yourself with people who offer you safety and accept you just the way you are. Like your family had to, in the olden days. What we are accustomed to regard as a traditional home, the house you grew up in, the familiar places, the way from your house to school and the favourite secret spots where you used to meet up with your friends, that restricted area of familiar social interactions with the church at its centre, the cemetery where your ancestors are buried, the scene of many intense arguments with near and distant family members, the drunken neighbour, your first heartbreak - that is no longer a constant for many of us. We are required to reinvent the notion of home over and over again, to shift the paradigm and adjust to new and often painfully unfamiliar circumstances.

I have lived long enough to realise that to some degree this idea of home equals heart is not so ridiculous. Strictly speaking, human beings have wondered the earth for thousands of years, we are nomadic by nature. Permanent settlements and the social-hierarchical structures that define them have had a very short history, in the greater scheme of things. Yet we are all looking for that home, we aspire to be integrated in a community and belong somewhere. 

I am an Eastern-European girl, born and raised in a small town in central Romania. I have lived here and there in Europe, finally ending up in Norway, which I have decided I shall make my final destination. I live in a suburb of Stavanger, the third largest city in Norway. In many ways this place is similar to the town where I was born and raised, I am surrounded by hills and water, lots of lush and opulent nature; there are remnants of an agricultural settlement, but in a modernized version, with a well-functioning industrial infrastructure to sustain it. Even though I have lived here for almost four years now, I haven't quite managed to create a network of friends and - beyond my core family, which now only consists of my two children, some fleeting love affairs, wine evenings with the ladies from the neighbourhood - I have spent a lot of my days here alone. Norwegian people are exceptional, in every way. Kind, polite, cheerful, warm... But, similarly to Sweden where I was lucky enough to spend many years before I moved here, the social fabric is very finely weaved by family ties and life-long friendships, and there is hardly ever a place for a solitary stranger like myself.  

Language is a tremendously big part of this dissonance. Although I managed to learn Norwegian quite quickly, I do realise that I am prone to miss social cues and still struggle to internalise norms and conventions. There are various degrees of socializing with colleagues and neighbours and expats I have met here and there, but I can't say I feel comfortably "at home". And I am convinced there are many people just like me out there... Which is the main reason I have started dotting down these thoughts. I want and need to understand how this has played out for others, in a similar situation. I will tell stories of wonderers and their notion of home, whether it is found in geography, culture, friendships, acquired family ties, etc. My own journey is yet to be chronicled, and when it is, I hope to find out where I am. Is it home? 

It is my hope that through finding out what other expats have experienced and retelling those stories, I might be able to understand my longing and restlessness. It certainly doesn't help that the version of home I have envisioned when I moved here - with the wonderful house and the big garden, close to a forest and a lovely beach, in a safe and crimefree neighbourhood, decent schools and shops and all that - is slowly slipping through my fingers. I am on the verge of losing that home, and that set off a crises, but also a possibility: that of being able to find my own, personal idea of belonging, not one superimposed by a partner's notion of it. But more about that soon... 

As I submerged myself in the process of learning about what home is, I took the academic path and read sociological studies. So I shall start by summarizing what I have learnt. But this is an intimate problem and I doubt that research will be in any way comforting or useful. So the idea is to write fictional accounts of real human stories. I am genuinely excited to see what I find out. 

Strolling down the literary path compels me to end this introductory post with a few examples from books that I have read and that struck a cord in reference to the idea of home. Enjoy!

Trees, by Herman Hesse

A longing to wonder tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, this longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is the longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home. Every path leads homeward, every step is birth, every step is death, every grave is mother. 

So the tree rustles in the evening, when we stand uneasy before our own childish thoughts: Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy. Whoever has learned how to listen to trees, no longer wants to be a tree. He wants to be nothing, except what he is. That is home. That is happiness.

West with the Night, by Beryl Markham 

I have learned that if you must leave a place that you have lived in and loved, and where all your yesterdays are buried deep, leave it any way, except a slow way, leave it the fastest way you can. Never turn back and never believe that an hour you remember is a better hour because it is dead. Passed years seem safe ones, vanquished ones, while the future lives in a cloud, formidable from a distance.

Giovanni's Room, by James Baldwin

Perhaps home is not a place, but simply an irrevocable condition.

The Honourable Schoolboy, by John le Caree

Home's where you go when you run out of homes. 

Night Train to Lisbon, by Pascal Mercier

We leave something of ourselves behind when we leave a place, we stay there, even though we go away. And there are things in us that we can find again only by going back there. 

Fool's Fate, by Robin Hobb

Home is people. Not a place. If you go back there after the people are gone, then all you can see is what isn't there anymore. 

Five Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris

I let it go. It's like swimming against the current. It exhausts you. After a while, whoever you are, you just have to let go, and the river brings you home. 

The Tent, by Margaret Atwood

A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness. 

The Lazarus Project, by Alexander Hemon

Home is where somebody notices when you are no longer there. 

Angle of Repose, by Wallace Stegner 

Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate, and only the uprooted comprehend.