More than 1,500 miles and eight days since leaving home, Joan and I arrived back in Kent at midnight Tuesday. There is nothing like sleeping in your own bed and knowing that while vacations are nice, the travel, expectations of family and the never-ending quest to find something decent to eat are done for a while.
As a native of the Empire State, every year Joan and I try to spend some time visiting family on both sides of our tree. That means covering almost every region of New York, visiting places both familiar and fresh. This year’s adventure was no different, and with quite a bit of time to talk in the car, we returned with new memories, ideas for the house, yard, garden and community, as well as more things to talk about.
We try to spend as much time as we can with my mom, one of my sisters and two of my brothers. Joan has a sister and her family in Albany. We also got to see a nephew on Joan’s side of the tree in Ithaca, as he is soon to graduate from Cornell. We also enjoyed spending some time on hiking trails, lakes, exploring new towns, cities and villages, and gawking at architecture, for better or for worse. We of course catch up with state and local politics wherever we go and always return appreciating what we have, the work we do and the place we call home.
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Somebody has said that “home is where your heart is.” While this may be true, home is mostly where you invest your life. It is the house you live in, the garden you grow, the street you live on, the neighbors you have, and the connections you have made in work, play and community involvement. While I enjoy the Adirondacks, Rochester, Thousand Islands, Eagle Bay, Albany, Delmar , Ithaca and the finger lakes – none of them are “home” and never will be. Indeed, the home I grew up in, the house my mom lives in now, nor any of the special places in my past can replace the home we have made here in Kent.
While in architecture school and sociology class I gained some insight into what makes a good place, it is only in living that I can contribute to the making of “home.” Traveling with eyes looking at the different ways that people define their home place is especially rewarding, and helps me to work harder at looking at the place I call home. What is important about our house, our garden, our neighborhood? What can we do to remake these places, and contribute to the remaking of our town and region into something even better? Every place has characters and characteristics that make it unique and define home in both tangible and intangible ways. Do we fully appreciate those that have come before us and care enough about those who will follow to invest our lives in remaking our world?
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Do those ladies at the table next to us at the restaurant play golf in a league? Are any of them related? Do they have dinner together every week? What do they do for a living? How long have they lived in this town?
Does the person, originally from Ohio, with the degree from Syracuse, sell canoes because it is his passion or because he has to in order to pay the bills?
Did the people building the 410 stairs to the top of Buttermilk Falls in Ithaca as part of their work for the Civilian Conservation Corp WPA project enjoy dressing, hauling and aligning those heavy stones? Do the people that use them appreciate what it took to mix mortar at the edge of a cliff? Do those who want to cut the parks budgets and close down such parks appreciate the intrinsic common value of appreciating a 12,000 year old stream and the way it cascades down the mountain?
Visiting the homes of others also reminds us that we need to always be looking for creative ways to live with people who think very differently than us. Within family circles we often agree to disagree about religion, politics and other subjects in order to focus on what is important. Our common cause requires us to be less ideological, more practical, and even more graceful.
As we return home and look forward to a summer in the outdoors, we know we will have a little more time to envision and dream about little and big things for our lives and find time to spend with friends and family near and far. I am not sure what makes home so sweet, and I know for sure that I cannot put it into words. You know what I am talking about. I hope your home is as sweet as ours is just about now.