Nostalgia: from the Greek nostos meaning homecoming and algos meaning pain.
I grew up in an idyllic place. It was like Bedford Falls (It’s a Wonderful Life) with a Western Pennsylvania accent. It was the same town my parents had grown up. My grandparents lived there, too. My two brothers and I walked to school. My dad rode his bike ten blocks every day to the shoe store he owned on main street. My mom stayed home, kept house, and made elderberry pie and the most amazing maple cinnamon rolls. Until I left for college, I had the same friends I’d known since kindergarten.
It was so much like Bedford Falls that we even had a statue of our most famous native son, Jimmy Stewart, outside the public library.
At the center of my world was a house--a bright red, three-bedroom rancher with white shutters and curved driveway. It sat on the corner of Cherry Alley and Poplar Avenue. My parents built it themselves, on property they bought from my grandpa after they returned from my dad’s short stint in the Navy. It was a special house – every detail crafted and decorated with pride, from the pine paneled walls to the wagon wheel chandelier, from the custom cabinets and built-in bookcases to the collection of ticking clocks and my Dad’s meticulously-organized workshop. The back yard had a layered stone wall and an apple tree, surrounded by enormous arborvitaes that were perfect for hiding during games of Kick the Can. The house at 355 Poplar was their pride and joy – that house and the three sons they raised.
Speaking of sons, we all grew up and left home. Chris ended up in Pittsburgh; Dave in Arizona. I met a beautiful girl named Karen at college and we settled near her hometown in Central Pennsylvania. None of us ever lived in Indiana again.
Of course, we returned often, for summer visits, for Thanksgiving, for Christmas, and for Mom’s—now Grandma’s--maple cinnamon rolls. That house was our homing beacon, our comfort zone, the stake securely holding our tethers no matter where we wandered.
My own three boys loved that house. They’d eat Grandma’s mac’n cheese and then disappear to the basement to play ping pong and tell secrets with their cousins. In the evenings we’d gather at the dining room table for the family feast, and afterwards fill it with a game of Trivial Pursuit, Monopoly, Risk or one we made up ourselves. It was the warmest, most comfortable, most familiar place in the entire world. It was the kind of place you never had to think about being, like an old sweatshirt you forgot you were wearing.
We deceived ourselves into thinking things would never change, that they would always be this way. Even as my parents entered their 80s, even after my dad survived a bout with melanoma and a stroke, even as my mom lost sight in one eye, I refused to consider the end. Whenever those thoughts would pop into my mind, I would put them away faster than the dinner dishes. I couldn’t imagine the day when we couldn’t gather in that house. I believed we would always be able to come home again.
In the summer of 2016, my mom began experiencing a mild, odd anxiety. She said she just didn’t feel right. It worsened throughout the fall, but none of us quite knew what to do. Christmas that year was at my brother’s house. Mom and Dad were there, but it was different, not being at their place. Then one Saturday in January of 2017, my brother Chris got a frantic call from my dad. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t take care of your mom.”
My mom’s anxiety had gotten so bad she would stare at her food with trembling lips for an hour. She was frightened to walk to the bathroom. She had a constant look of fear on her face. We tried to provide help, our own and some from outside, but by Easter, it was so bad we had no choice but to move them into a nursing home.
I still remember the exact moment of their departure from that house. My mom was barely moving as we shuffled her to the car. My dad trailed behind, resigned, confused, scared. We were able to get them a room together at the facility, and mom seemed to stabilize a bit, but within a week or two she was unable to walk. They moved her down the hall to the memory unit, where she resumed being terrified of everything. Now my dad was mostly alone -- wrested from his home, his life, and his wife of 63 years – in a span of 4 months.
The home had to be settled. My brothers and I convened one weekend in May to decide what we would keep. The rest was sold at an auction in the front yard. My dad watched as things he and mom had made together, things they had treasured and that represented an entire life together, sold for pennies on the dollar.
By August, the house was bare. By the end of 2017, it belonged to someone else. Squatters, I called them, though it wasn’t their fault. When I walked out of the house for the last time, I cried a bunch of tears, then resumed daily life and tried to pretend it hadn’t happened.
I recently read a lovely book called Home by Jo Swinney. Having moved a lot as a child, she’s always had a fascination with the idea of what home is. She recognized in herself something built into all of us--a deeper longing, a homesickness, that followed her around like a trailer. It’s what the Welsh call Hiraeth--a longing for what may not exist anymore or perhaps never did. So she wrote about all the places we look for home -- friends, family, church, country, community, faith--and of course, a house. Her writing is full of joy and hope, but it’s also cautionary.
There is nothing wrong with happy childhood memories. There is nothing bad about looking back and remembering times and places in which we once belonged. There is nothing wrong with recollecting the past with affection and gratitude. But we must be alert to the danger of thinking home was back then, not now. Unless we reject that notion, there will be no cure for our homesickness. We can’t return to a home in the past.
There are emotions we can see coming and can prepare to handle. And there are emotions we do not see coming and have no idea what to do with them when they arrive. I think homesickness is one of those emotions. If left unvented, it builds up and roils about until it causes an emotional cave in. Having taken my home for granted for so long, I was caving in in its absence.
I was sitting in the backyard of my own house one day when I got a text from Thomas, who was away at college. Attached was a rough version of a song he’d written. He called it Indiana. It was about me, my parents, my hometown, and Karen. Without knowing, he’d drilled down and opened the vent. The tears flowed again.
That song was the beginning of a project called The Indiana EP. Thomas and Jonathan decided to write a series of songs about their grandparent’s house and the inevitable changes time and aging brought to our family. It includes essays of their remembrances. More importantly, the songs remind us of the hope we all have: that home matters, that what’s real won’t end, that spring is eternal, and that our true home is waiting for us. I still find my own Hiraeth welling up at the most unexpected times, and probably always will, but these songs have brought a great deal of healing to me. That, and pride, of course. What greater gift could children give their father than to create beautiful art speaking words he could not find himself?
Perhaps they can be your words, too. We are all looking for a place to which we can tether our soul, having lost the one we call home while waiting for it anew.
Essays and songs available at
theindianaep.com