What is Home?
by Kathryn Thurber, Humanities and English Instructor
For most of my life, I thought ?home? was a simple enough concept. It started for me on Fernwood Avenue. It was wherever my parents were. It stayed that way, while I rented various apartments, accumulated degrees-and for two amazing years-lived on a sailboat. Then, for more than twenty years, home was my big old house on 17th Avenue in Minneapolis. Two of my three children were born there. Our first dog, Ted, lived and died there. Some of his ashes reside in the flower beds he loved to nose around in. We had many summer gardens, winter snow forts, and birthday parties. Thanksgiving and Christmas rituals will always be associated with that house.
But it is no longer ?home.? Like my childhood home, it is all memories and old photographs now. Last year, we moved to Morgantown, West Virginia to come to work at WVU. Packing up meant sorting, donating, throwing away so many things. The home was dismantled. Only the shell remained for someone else to fill. It is a lovely old shell that was built in 1909-with hard wood floors and a built-in oak buffet. Prism class at the tops of the many windows made rainbows on the walls and carpets. Ted loved to sun himself in those colorful little pools of light. Old houses in Minnesota have lots of windows that are broad and long to catch as much sunlight as possible during the short days of the long winter. Our things were all around—old photographs of our immigrant grandparents from Sweden and Italy-hence, our children, ?the Swedish meatballs.?
We thought home was going to be here in Morgantown, but it has not worked out as we had hoped. My concept of home is not as simple as it used to be. It has become much more dynamic and flexible. At least for now, home is something I have reinvented twice since leaving Minneapolis, and I will probably reinvent again within the next year. Last Fall, I made ?home? in faculty housing in Evansdale, but I couldn?t make Thanksgiving there. It was too stark a contrast and too cramped a space, compared to our traditional holiday dinners. So, we celebrated Thanksgiving with friends in Maryland, and although it was lovely, the family consensus is that Thanksgiving needs to be ?just us? in Morgantown, and I must cook all the traditional things, or else.
Then Christmas came. Again, we left the McDonald?s drive-thru lights that shone mercilessly into our kitchen, for the cozy comforts of an old cabin in Pocahontas County. I found a potted evergreen with lights and Christmas decorations in Kroger?s, and we set it by the fireplace, and arranged our gifts around it. I cooked Christmas dinner there with a small oven and no dishwasher. But it was wonderful to be together in that Little House on the Prairie way-Ma and Pa and the kids just doing our family thing, appreciating how lucky we are that we learned so much from that old house about how to make ?home? wherever we are. Shortly after Christmas, we moved to a town house overlooking the site of the “great dig” that will someday be a Super Kroger’s.
This year, my husband?s career has taken him to Oswego, New York, to teach at the State University there. I am teaching in English and Humanities here at WVU. Our youngest daughter is an eighth grader at Suncrest elementary, and has made a remarkable transition to her new life here. But ?home? is even more of a challenge to define, when professional life leads to this kind of ?double household? thing. Is it where I am? Is it where my husband is? One daughter is living in London. The other is away at college in New England. The garage of my Morgantown town home is filled NOT with the car, but with boxes that have never been unpacked and furniture that won?t fit inside. Some day, I hope to have a house again. In the meantime, much of what makes a Thurber ?home? is in storage.
But not all of it is boxed and bubble-wrapped. The most precious elements are carried within us. We?re like turtles, who carry their homes on their backs. Our home is ?a moveable feast? we can recreate wherever we gather. This year, Thanksgiving will be in Morgantown. Christmas will be in the cabin again, and the three Thurber girls and their parents will make ?home? together with our memories of the past that we share and our hopes for the future. That is what home is to me now.
