The Importance of Place

For the last two and a half months I have been homeless, essentially.

Which is not to say I've been sleeping in my car or on the streets.  Far from it.  I've been travelling, hosted by family and friends, staying in hotels.  I've been to Europe and up and down most of the Eastern Seaboard. 

I've never been the kind of person who gets homesick.  Far from it.  Wherever I am, I'm at home.  As much as I've loved most of the places I've lived (and I have) I've never felt a sense of loss when I moved on somewhere else.  But after 10 or 11 weeks of sleeping two nights here, three nights there, rarely as many as four nights in a row, never an entire two weeks in the same place, I'm ready to have a place I can call my own.

As I said, friends and family have been phenomenal: welcoming us, putting us up, feeding us, entertaining us.  We've stayed in some very nice hotels, some pretty basic hotels, all clean, all livable.  But I've been living out of a suitcase.  And I've discovered that I need a place I can call my own, where I have my pillow, my pictures, my things.  A place where I'm not aware of being a guest, which is to say a place over which I have control. 

It's not like I'm going to punch holes in the wall or paint them black.  We are, in fact, going to be living in an apartment, so there are absolute limits to what we can do with our space.  But it will be our space.  And we're looking forward to welcoming the guests who come (hoping to payback some of the folks who have been so hospitable to us these past months!), to moving the furniture, to knowing where the silverware goes, to having breakfast any time we want, to being completely at rest, which is hard to do when you are in someone else's space.

This makes me mindful of all those folks who have no place to call their own:  to those who ARE on the streets, or sleeping in cars or in shelters.  What a terrible stress, what distress, to live with that sense of uncertainty, of being uprooted or rootless.  What a terrible burden to live with, not having a place where you can be completely at ease, a place to call your own.