Is Home a Place or a Feeling?

by Suzanne Westhues
 
I sit at the writing space in the Moon Room at the Mutual Aid Society, an artists’ retreat in Stamford, New York. It is the first night of the retreat and spirits are high after a delicious meal of vegetarian stew and garlic bread. Writers have come from California, Holland, Luxembourg, New Mexico, and Texas, and the mood is light yet charged. That afternoon we are given several questions to think about, among them: is home a place or a feeling? It’s the Catskills on the cusp of Spring in April. There is still laughter downstairs, but I sit in my upstairs room staring into an acrylic painting of mostly green, gray and dark brown, some kind of structure, maybe even set in these mountains.

Someone has attached a small clear yellow crystal to the left side of the table. I look up and there is one red dart left stuck in the ceiling. The back of the door painted yellow, royal blue, purple and crimson red is almost beautiful, but it has some damage. The hardwood floors do not shine, but they still have wide, old-fashioned planks.  I only sink down once in the wood, low-sitting chair in the corner, the fabric is a mix of athletes and scholars. I leave the wooden closet doors open, where a couple of blouses hang. I always move into any place where I sleep, even if it is just for a couple of days. The rest of my clothes take up the small oak-stained chest. Someone has pinned a turquoise beaded sailboat to the top left. The windows are six over six, and the heat comes up through the small floor grate. My thoughts turn to home in New England, 200 miles away.

 
It’s April, 2024, weeks before a month of change. One child will graduate college and the other will move home. It is ten years since my uncle passed and 26 years after we got engaged in a hilly, grassy park in Boston. The yellow buds fall from the trees. I wish someone would tell the sun to come out. It is Spring but the sky looks more like late winter. Our old neighbors are packing to move away. The fish tank in my office buzzes on peacefully, but there are no fish left inside.

I remember looking at this house with Aunt Joan in 2005. “I know the first thing you’ll do to the house is add French doors to the back,” she said. Aunt Joan, still healthy back then, has a gleam in her eye. My beloved Aunt Joan. Once president of the Milton Women’s Club. A realtor with a flair for fashion and visions for New England colonial houses.

I never do add those doors. Instead, I cover the radiator covers with thirty-three plants and leave the windows. It is a focal point that makes up the next couple of decades, the years our family gets to have together in the South Shore. Grandmother. Great aunt and uncle. Mother. Father. Children. A rescue beagle. A one family house.

Last March those windows are the last vantage point my mom has in our home. It is the usual Saturday dinner of salmon chowder and Karelian pies, but after dinner, she dies suddenly right in front of her apartment. We pick up the broken pieces of our life quickly, just as she would want. Time marches on and so do we.

Sometimes, now, a year later, I sit in my mom’s old chair at the dining room table, and I gaze across that room into the yard. The view. The plants. The Christmas cactus. The Peace Lilies. The backyard of squirrels, rabbits, robins, and sparrows. My grandmother’s mahogany curio cabinet. The Amari charger on top that my parents received for their wedding fifty years ago.

The house stands, the home is all around us. Some days I want to move far away and never ever look back. Some days I want to keep everything exactly in the spot where it was, the last night she came over, the last night she was alive. Some days I imagine painting over everything with fresh green paint. Some days things in the house just break and the decision gets made for me.

Home is always a feeling, never geography, yet sometimes home is also a fixer-upper on a highway with memories. Of a mother who was both a soulmate and someone I had to try to have an identity apart from. Her martini glass, now unused, sits on the shelf of the curio cabinet. Home is also a warm radiator and a front door that locks. Home is my favorite record on the turntable. A basket of bananas in the kitchen. Home is a home, an actual home, for now.

I spent my school vacations in this town as a child. Aunt Joan and Uncle Peter played tennis and had a swimming pool with flowers in the backyard. They fell asleep every night watching Johnny Carson. I wanted my children to grow up in a colonial with a backyard. Somewhere in my mind, at first, I imagined I moved to Aunt Joan and Uncle Peter’s Milton. The Fruit Center. East Milton Square. The Gazebo. The Women’s Clubhouse. It took me a couple of decades to invent another Milton. It was more relaxed than theirs. Dinners could be eaten early or late. If someone wanted a different meal, they could make it. I decorated with the secondhand furniture left by the previous homeowner mixed in with my father’s wingchairs. Since our home was smaller than many others in the town, I never had to host any school
events. I was free.

Lives change. Families evolve. Ours was no different.

Fewer phone calls or invitations. Our children took on new lives as young adults.

Through the loss of my mother, there are also a handful of people who have also come up, who accept the four of us unconditionally. The ones who don’t expect the four of us “to be like everyone else.” The ones who pay attention when I create something or get published. The ones who know that my husband and my daughter are both singer-songwriters and listen to their music. The ones who read my older daughter’s articles and follow her start-up company. The ones who show me love and acceptance.

Home is honesty. Vulnerability. Security. Not only for my children but for my husband and me.

After my mom died, my neighbor came over: “Your mother hasn’t left you.”

I know that, too. But what to make with the pieces that are left?

I am in uncharted space, a place of growth and change. A place I didn’t choose. Not many people from the past twenty years came with me. Home used to be bigger but home became a tiny circle of blood or chosen family – people who showed up when no one else did.

My mother always left me an escape route. In our family’s so-called busy years, it was her idea that we have dinners once a week, and in the years leading up to her passing, she was vocal in her dislike of cemeteries, repeating over and over, “they’re not here.” When the inevitable happened, I had many things to reassure me and found my own journey of honoring her memory.

The true memorials are the “Good morning” text messages I send my two children. The teaching that I do for college students. The dinners I manage to cook for my husband. The life I continue to live—even if I count the success in breaths taken, another day “lived.”

Wife. Mother. Teacher. Friend. All are important roles, even if I carry them out in the name of daughter.

Someone once told me that gardening would ease the grief of the empty nest, that the smell of earth in my fingers would remind me of growth, possibilities, new beginnings but summers in New England are short and the space outside limited. Our tiny garden is more of a refuge for stray animals, bunnies, squirrels, robins, bluejays, cardinals, purple and yellow finches, the kind of birds that come from books.

Someone once told me that birdsong meant no predators, maybe the strange gift of living on a busy highway, few coyotes and foxes come by and the birds know it. Someone once told me that indoor plants clean the air, so I surrounded myself with a family of plants. Peace lilies. Thanksgiving cacti. And one hearty tree that I secretly call Brooklyn because I once saw one like it in an overpriced secondhand store in Williamsburg/Brooklyn. Someone once told me that white roses stand for new beginnings, so maybe that’s why I have kept vases of them these past years. Someone once told me that my house was beautiful and I decided to believe it.

In a house that always looked decorated, I always searched for ways to add color. A brighter paint for the living room. I hoarded plants that were already overgrown and orange upholstery for the chairs. Home meant color. It always has, no matter how many places I go or vistas I keep in my eyes. Until decades later I realize that I have recreated my father’s house, and despite a lot of trying, we are really the same. It was stupid to fight nature, so I smile and acknowledge how my deep roots nourish my present branches. There was no use denying it, so I took comfort in what had grown up all around me and for a moment began to rest.

Sometimes I also picture wells. What a beautiful, reassuring image that the imagination fills itself, even when the stories seem written and it feels like no one is listening and you imagine that whatever you had is used up. The idea that life restores itself and even when the world seems to look away. There within yourself, there is always more to say. Life carries on.

In the Catskills, at breakfast I eavesdrop on conversations between writers while drinking black coffee. There is a framed poster of “A Curious Collection of Edible Mushrooms Found in the Catskills.” A full pot of freshly made coffee and an oversized hot pot of bright purple tea. Two foraging baskets hang from the wall and wire baskets of garlic, onions and apples. A spice rack. Some phone numbers still written in pen on the wall. The radiator covers match the deep red woodwork and a sign that reads “I’m Not a Fast Cook. I’m Not a Slow Cook. I’m a Half Fast Cook.”

In the mornings we sit in the barn heated by the wood-burning stove. The floor is covered with a red wool rug, flanked by two old wooden church pews and a yellow bench. Two disco balls hang from the ceiling and a square acrylic painting hangs on the wall and a portrait of a brown woman with a purple fan in her hair. Someone has left a jar of forsythias on a chair. In the back there is a hanging lime green castle with a message that reads “Resume the nomadic style of your early childhood.”

In the evenings we sit in the living room but never light the wood-burning stove, maybe because there are so many of us. In the corner, there is an emerald green foot locker, a sprawling Monstera plant in a black pot, six or seven logs, hanging spider plants. A brown water jug with the Virgin Mary painted in blue. A hooked scatter rug and a low coffee table held with logs. Framed prints of an indoor fresco of peach, green, purple and pink lilies in a vase and a peace lily by itself. Two oversized floor lamps. Wood shutters and unused curtain rods. A crystal water decanter.

A colorful wood angel in flight hangs from the ceiling. A spray-painted silver table. Two throw blankets, one canary yellow, the other mustard and a beige throw pillow with embroidered red mushrooms. A framed poster message reads, “I appreciate the colors of the flowers I see right now.”

And I do appreciate those colors, I really do.