Searching for my true home

A ranch on a gravel road in Clinton, N.Y.

I dreamed of New York last night. I was in Ithaca, where I first went to college, and the first place I lived on my own. In my dream, Andrew and I were living there. I was in grad school. Andrew found a great job. It was summer. The sun was shining, but the air was cool. All I can remember from the dream was the downtown square with its cobblestone streets and lots of sunlight. I woke up at 7:40 a.m., surprised to find myself in our apartment. The dream felt so real. I should have been in Ithaca.

What is home? Is it a place or a state of mind? I’ve been in North Carolina for almost 11 years now, and it still doesn’t feel like home. But this is where my community is, my friends who have become family. This is where friends have laid flowers at my doorstep or brought me homemade chicken soup when I was sick.

The day after I found out I miscarried, two of my dearest friends came by just to be with me. I was on the couch wrapped in a blanket and wearing black stretch pants and a hooded sweatshirt. It was February. I hadn’t showered all day. My eyes were still puffy from crying; they felt scratchy. It was a no contacts kind of day.

Miriam brought me Chinese, pork lo mein. My favorite. She always tries to feed me when I’m depressed. She knows how I reject food when I’m grieving. She sat on the couch next to me and just listened. I don’t remember what she said, but I know that she made me feel better. She knows me in a way that not many do. She sees me straight down to my core. That’s home.

My best friend Addy arrived at my door with a tiny square box tied with a bow and containing truffles. She also brought Kleenex, the rectangular size, with blue and white splatters like an abstract painting. It reminded me of my grandma’s house; she always had the larger, rectangular Kleenex boxes. Addison sat with me for hours. She let me cry. She held my hand. Somehow, she managed to make me laugh.We binged on “Barefoot Contessa” episodes and talked about how Ina needs to be friends with us and invite us over for dinner every night. We took a selfie and sent it to my mom in California to show her I was OK. I was in good hands. That’s home right?

The best of friends will sit with you and your grief and see you through your darkest moments.

Maybe home isn’t a place. Maybe home is people, your village, the ones who lift you up in your darkest moments.

But in New York , when I was there last week, it felt like home to me. I miss it. I miss the feeling I had when I was there. It felt familiar. Being with my sister. Sipping white wine from stemless glasses. Giggling together, crying together. Gina is home.

Every day, I drove from my sister’s house in Albany to the Omega Institute outside of Rhinebeck, N.Y. where I was participating in a week-long writing retreat. I never minded the hour and 15 minute drive. It was peaceful. It gave me time to ease into the morning and space to decompress and digest the day on the way home. It gave me time to ponder and time to observe this beautiful land around me. Every day I crossed the Hudson River twice; it was my favorite part of the ride. The Hudson is breathtaking. It’s wider than most rivers I’ve seen and, damn, the light it’s just magical there. Most of my drive consisted of two-lane rural roads that careened through the countryside of fields and ice cream stands and rivers and golden sunlight and wildflowers and mountains and open roads.

On those drives, I felt a longing that I could not explain. It felt like home to me, even though I didn’t live there. Often during that week, I would catch my throat tightening or my eyes welling up with tears as I drove, taking in the landscape and all its beauty. At first I thought it was a side effect from all the intensive, personal writing I did during the day at my retreat. But this was more like a deep sadness, and I realize now, looking back, that what I was feeling was homesick.

One evening, I got to watch the sun set on my drive home. As I turned off the Taconic Parkway and headed north, the sky revealed a beautiful sunset of orange and pink dotted with clouds in various shades of blue. The Catskills looked like giant blue shadows along the horizon. Their presence was a permanent fixture, grounded and unmovable. Now I understand why so many painters have fallen in love with the Hudson Valley. Its beauty made me weep. Why do I feel such a deep connection to this place?

Somewhere along Route 9 in New York. (Photo by Carla Kucinski)

I’ve been sad since I’ve been back from New York. Tuesday night at the dinner table, I burst into tears. “I miss my sister,” I told Andrew. I choked on each word as it tried to leave my throat. We had just come from looking at a house to buy. We’ve been unsuccessfully house-hunting since July. That night we toured a split-level with green shutters, tan vinyl siding, white columns holding up the front porch. It’s in a great neighborhood — actually, one of the neighborhoods we want to live in. It’s woodsy, quiet.

As I walked to the front door of the house, I saw a dad teaching his son to ride a bike. Images like that still have the power to break me. Inside, the house was beautiful. But way too much house for just the two of us and our dog. It hit me that night as I cried over my ratatouille that we don’t know what the future holds. Even looking for a house makes me sad. As we walk through each new home, I count bedrooms, I imagine where the nursery will be, if the yard is big enough for a child, if it’s in a good school district. And then I think: “What if there’s no baby in the picture?”

Sometimes I feel like I’ll never be pregnant again. The concept feels so out of reach. It feels impossible, deep down in my gut. This feeling has replaced the hope I’ve been carrying all these months. I don’t know where it went. It just slipped away.

“Your true home is in the here and now,” says Thich Nhat Hanh, a Buddist teacher. “Your true home is not an abstract idea; it is something you can touch and live in every moment.” He says home is in your body, in your mind, in your present moment. But what if in the present moment all you’re feeling is anxiety and fear and questioning everything? Then what?

Greensboro was supposed to be a temporary stop. I thought I’d be here for three or five years. But then I bought a house, got married and got divorced all in that order. This was 2010. I wanted to leave North Carolina and go anywhere, live anywhere but here. I wanted to run from the present and start a new life. I could have left then, but my heart already endured so much heartbreak and change that the idea of picking up my life and starting over scared me. I didn’t want to say goodbye to my friends; that would have been another loss too difficult to bear. They had become family. Without them, I wouldn’t have survived my divorce.

And then, Andrew came into my life. I fell in love. He reopened my closed heart and showed me how to trust again. He gave me hope. That was 2011. And now it’s almost 2017, and I still feel like I’m straddling a line – one foot in North Carolina and one foot out.

“Don’t think about leaving,” I told myself the morning I was flying back to Greensboro. I usually start crying much sooner before I get to the airport, like in the shower or while putting on my mascara, my lashes damp with tears. Saying goodbye to any of my sisters is never easy. Last time I left, I cried so much that the TSA agent came up to me in line to make sure I was OK.

Gina and I are partners in crime. The magpies, my dad called us. We’re two years apart. She’s the middle child; I’m the baby. As kids she gave me piggy back rides around the house. I was afraid of jumping onto her back for fear she wouldn’t catch me. (I have control issues.) She’d sit on the edge of the bed and let me crawl onto her back, and at the end of the ride, she’d return me to my bed as promised and let me roll off her back like I was falling backwards into a lake. She’s always looking out for me, even though we’re both adults now. I still need looking after.

Last night I came across an old journal entry from 2006. As I read my own words, I could feel my sadness and desperation. I was lost. “What’s my purpose? What am I supposed to be doing? Why am I here?” I laughed as I read the questions aloud. Ten years later, the questions haven’t changed. Will I always be searching? What is this void that I continue to carry and can’t seem to fill? Has this feeling always been there? Maybe the answers are waiting for me in New York.

Gina and me toasting to my last night in New York. The picture is blurry because we were having so much fun.

Connecting to place

It’s a cloudless, sunny day – the kind that doesn’t feel much like January. Coats will be worn, but unzipped. Gloves will be off, but tucked in the coat pockets just in case. When I take my dog to the big open field by the middle school in our neighborhood, I un-clip her leash from her collar and she runs into the wind, smiling. She too feels the shift in the air.

By Carla Kucinski

It is my day off, and I’m spending it writing, reading, reflecting. Though I will confess, I spent the morning working on a presentation for work, but I did it in my pajamas and slippers, and therefore, it felt less “work-like.” But I surrendered at noon, not allowing it to take over my entire day.

I am in my living room, sitting on the couch, notebook in my lap, sunshine streaming through the French doors, warming the room like an oven. My dog lies on the living room floor in a patch of sun the shape of a rectangle. She is breathing softly through her nose, the way dogs do when they first drift off to sleep.

I live essentially in three rooms in my condo: the bedroom, the kitchen and this room. These spaces occupy the majority of my time. It’s been a few months now since we moved into our condo. I like it here. It’s cozy and compact, but not in a claustrophobic way. I like that I can talk to my husband in the living room while I prepare dinner in the kitchen and we share moments from our day. I like that when I step out onto the balcony, which seems to always be bathed in sunlight I can look out over the tree tops and roof tops, and watch the seasons change. Sunsets from here are spectacular in their various shades of pink.

By Carla Kucinski

What’s not fun is hauling three bags of groceries up three flights of stairs, and the dogs next door that bark every time we set foot on our doorstep. But it beats raking a yard full of leaves. In any case, you get used to it. Sometimes, you grow to love it, even the force of the train a half-mile down the street, whose blaring horn slices the dark and stillness of the night. There’s comfort in knowing someone else is awake early in the morning.

We drove by our old house the other day. It felt strangely foreign to me, as if we never lived there. Everything about it was the same, except for a pair of white lace curtain hanging from the front window. I never hung curtains in that window; they would have blocked the view.

I’ve realized that I’ve learned to adapt easily to new surroundings. I can quickly turn a house into a home. Start from scratch. I dream of one day owning our own house, a quaint bungalow with a forest for a backyard and a front porch for swinging. I can picture the house, but never the place.

Angel Oak Tree by Carla Kucinski

All this moving sometimes makes me feel rootless. Without roots, there’s no commitment. I’ll always be searching for the next thing. Owning a home both terrifies me and excites me. Owning keeps one from moving, which is the part that scares me. Renting gives one flexibility, prevents you from getting stuck. But wouldn’t it be nice to paint the walls the color I want?

“It is difficult to commit to living where we are, how we are. It is difficult and necessary. In order to make art, we must first make an artful life, a life rich enough and diverse enough to give us fuel. We must strive to see the beauty where we are planted, even if we are planted somewhere that feels very foreign to our nature.”

These words struck me today while reading Julia Cameron’s “The Sound of Paper.” She goes on to talk about how while living in New York she had to “work to connect to the parts of the city that feed my imagination and bring me a sense of richness and diversity instead of mere overcrowding and sameness.”

Perhaps that’s what’s at the heart of my “rootless” issue. I am not connecting to the parts of my city that feed my soul. Instead, I’ve felt very reclusive lately, drawing inward but not finding inspiration and thus blaming my lack of imagination on my environment. Cameron says we become victims if we aren’t willing to connect to the place we live to feed our imagination.

Foggy Morning Walk by Carla Kucinski

Photography has always connected me to places, moments. It helps me see the beauty in everyday life. Maybe I need to see more of my city through my lens or put it down and actually experience it instead of observing it.

“We must, as the elders advise us, bloom where we are planted,” Cameron writes. For if we don’t “our art dries up at the root.”

What an evocative image.

What feeds your imagination? What parts of your city do you connect to that feed your imagination? How do you connect?

By Carla Kucinski

I wish I had a river

I just read my bestie Carla’s Christmas blog post and my eyes are moist from a duet of bittersweet tears. She loves Christmas and her joy for the season is as palpable as her sister’s molten chocolate lava cake.

One of the things that makes Carla such a good writer is her gift of memory and I adore how she can recall the tiniest details of her mother’s holiday decorating routine from the smell of the cloves in her cookies to the fake snow on her wreath. She says, “My mom did Christmas right.”

My mom did, too.

Magnolia leaves. That’s what I remember most about my mother’s Christmas decorating. She would scour neighbor’s yards for leaves at all hours of the night and any flat surface was fair game but the mantle in our living room was her real masterpiece. As a child, I’m not sure I knew what elegant meant but I did know that our decorations were fancier than most of my friends and that made me feel oddly proud.

It’s funny what you remember – like the crackling of the hard frozen leaves touching each other as she meticulously made her arrangements. It’s a soothing sound to me now and I think I use magnolia leaves more to hear that familiar noise than anything else.

I’ve been through a blue Christmas or two with Carla when we were both recovering from loss and contrary to the Muzak in the mall, it’s just not “the most wonderful time of the year” for a lot of folks and I can still feel like a grinch for how oblivious I used to be to this reality – until it became my reality.

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Simpler times with my brother and our dog, Taffy. I still have that Santa.

Humbling, I think that’s the word for it.

Christmas for me has changed over the past decade as the loss of parents and a partner also brought about the loss of traditions. It has taken me a long time to be “okay” with that and I still approach this time of year with a sense of weary resignation.

My dear wife likes to gently tease me about calling any holiday thing we do for the second time a “tradition.” I can laugh at myself but the truth is that these new traditions make me feel grounded and connected in ways I haven’t felt in a very long time.

Going to the Christmas Day opening of a big new movie is one of these tradtions and this year’s entrée is “Into the Woods” with Meryl Streep. An amusing aside – I always run into some of my Jewish friends enjoying their tradition, too.

It’s a delicate balance – remembering Christmas past and celebrating Christmas present and I’m grateful to have found some ways to honor both.

My mother had a large collection of heavy glass Christmas trees that she loved. Her tastes were more modern than mine but when she died, I kept them. Last Christmas was the first year that my now wife and I shared a home and when I pulled out the glass trees, she was smitten and insisted we put them out on our mantle.

Tradition…

Yes, Mom, I did marry well.

I’m so happy Carla will be with her whole family for Christmas. I’ve seen that sad puppy face when she couldn’t be there and well, it’s just not a good look for her. I love her family – they are warm and loving and loud and funny and remind me of the family I used to have.

I always say that Carla is an old soul and my heart ached a little when she cited Joni Mitchell’s “River” in her post – “It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees.”

Me?

I wish I had a river I could skate away on.

Home is where your heart is

Four.

That’s how many times I’ve moved in the last nine years. And in 15 days, it will be five.

This was not necessarily a plan for me to move five times in the same city. It just sort of happened. The twists and turns of my life dictated it. I rented, I owned, I returned to renting.

It sounds exhausting when you think of it – five moves in nine years – but as odd as it may sound, when I look back on those years, I don’t think about the days spent duct-taping my life in cardboard boxes; I think about the memories made in each of the homes I lived.

Each house was special. I will forever feel nostalgic about the quaint, white bungalow I lived in when I first moved to Greensboro in 2005 – mostly because it was my “first.” It only had two closets the size of a cigar box, but the amazing front porch made up for its lack of storage space. I passed many hours on that porch with my dog Yoshi at my side and a cold beer in my hand during the hot summer months and a steaming cup of coffee when the leaves began to turn then spiral to the ground like pinwheels.

Every home I move from I cry on the last day. I get attached to things – even to inanimate objects. But to me, a house is more than a house; it’s a home. It has an energy to it, a heart and a soul that comes from the people who dwell under its roof, making memories.

Every house I lived in represented a chapter in my life and each was significant for different reasons. My bungalow signified my bachelorette days. I traded it for a split-level with my soon-to-be husband who later became my ex-husband. And despite all the tears I shed in that home, I loved that house. I thought I’d grow old in it. I remember the last walk-through I did in the house and how I paused in every room one last time and then shut the door behind me. It marked a beginning and an ending.

I downsized after that and moved into an adorable townhome. Life had come full circle and I was back to living single. It was a difficult transition. At age 31, I was starting over, and it scared me to death. I cried a lot those first few months – out of frustration, confusion, grief. That townhouse became my place for healing. It’s where I found renewal.

And then I met Andrew; the love of my life. He eventually gave up his bachelor pad downtown and moved in with me. Quarters were tight – but square footage doesn’t seem to matter when you’re in love. We lasted five months before we mutually decided to start casually looking for a new place that we could both call home. It was important to both of us to live somewhere new, not a home that was his or mine but one we could build together.

And that’s how we got to here.

We found this house simply by chance. On a day in February, my realtor friend Jim sent me an email that set everything in motion.

“GIRL!! I found you a house.”

My jaw fell open when I pulled up to the house the next day. It looked like a giant, mint green doll house with white trim and shutters. It was like a mini-mansion.

“Wait until you see the kitchen,” Jim said with wide, silver-dollar eyes as he ushered me inside. The kitchen was bathed in sunlight that shined through a pair of skylights and a wall of windows that looked out to a wooded area in the backyard. I already started to envision what the trees would look like with the change of seasons. Honey, I’m home.

We knew the house was way too big for just the two of us, but neither of us wanted to pass up the opportunity – or the walk-in closet. It seemed meant to be. And now here we are, a year and six months later, filling out change of address forms and hoarding cardboard boxes. Our lease is up, and the owners have sold the house. We didn’t anticipate this. I suppose we got spoiled and thought we could continue to extend our lease until we were ready to leave our fantasy home and buy our own house – maybe in six months, maybe in a year.

This week, I started feeling the first pangs of sadness about leaving our house. It started when I came home from work on Wednesday and saw my husband, waving to me from the front yard as he was walking to get the mail. Then, as I pulled into our half-moon driveway, our dog, Molly, ran up to the driver-side door and chased my car all the way to the garage, anxious to greet me.

Later on, at dusk, I stepped out onto the back deck and walked down into the yard to re-pot a houseplant. When I turned around and looked behind me, I was struck by the beauty of our house at twilight. I stood there for a moment in the chorus of cicadas and gazed at our home with its warm, golden glow emanating from its kitchen windows. And I thought to myself, “I’m going to miss this house.”

We’ve made good memories here – Andrew and me. This house was our first home together as a couple, and our first home as husband and wife. For that reason alone, it will always be special to us.

I remember sitting on the deck the night we got married. It was well past midnight. I was barefoot and still wearing my wedding dress. Andrew shed his tie and dress shirt and was wearing only a white undershirt and pants. We sat on our wooden bench on the deck and sipped beers and held hands and shared stories in the dark. Whenever I ask Andrew what his favorite moment was about our wedding day, he always describes this one.

It’s easy to get used to a place, comfortable. By the end of the month, we’ll be in our new home unpacking boxes again, deciding where to hang artwork, place furniture. And just like the four homes before this one, I will fall in love with it, get attached to it, make beautiful memories in it and then cry when it’s time to leave.