Setting down roots

Or how I finally found home inside of myself

Today’s essay is part of a series on home that includes me, Joshua Doležal, Bowen Dwelle, Michael Mohr's Sincere American Writing, Dee Rambeau, and Lyle McKeany. In the past we’ve written about trust, fatherhood, recovery, and work. We continue to explore our lives through these collaborations.This week, all of us wrestle with what home means to us. Please let us know how our meditations on home compare to your own.

And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles, no matter how long, but only by a spiritual journey, a journey of one inch, very arduous and humbling and joyful, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be at home. — Wendell Berry

I’ve had 20 homes in my 41 years. I’ve had so many homes I can barely remember many of them. Too small apartments and townhouses crawling with friends. Dorm rooms, always inspection ready, felt more like museums than homes. Large and small homes were filled with love and fights, children, parents, and in-laws. I even lived on an aircraft carrier for a year. Every few years I would get that familiar itch to move on, start over somewhere new. Except now. Now I finally found a home, the place to put roots down. 

For the first time ever, I found home.

When I was young, we lived with my grandparents in this old ranch-style house in Tulsa. It was one of those corner lots with a lawn that wrapped all the way around. There was this ancient silver maple behind the driveway. My grandfather, Pops, had hung a rope swing from one of the branches and I must have spent hours swinging back and forth. I can still feel the splintered wood against my pants when I think about it. I remember my Pops’ office in the back. It was like Neverland for a young boy, filled with trinkets and tools and drawings. He was an engineer and entrepreneur before I knew what either of those things were. But I knew the feeling of that room, the clutter that held its own sacred aura. I could live in those memories. And I remember the kitchen with the wood burning oven in the corner where he used to cook steaks for us every Saturday. He only cooked steaks one way: well done. Over the years, I learned the trick to getting a medium rare steak from that man: margaritas. The more margaritas I gave him, the rarer my steak was. I got really good at mixing drinks in that house.

I wanted to live in that house forever. I was, after all, just a boy, and I didn’t understand the fleeting nature of time. I thought everything could remain perfect forever, with three generations in that magical home. I idolized that life. Until one day we didn’t live there anymore. We moved to California, away from my grandparents and away from home. Many years later my grandparents sold their home, and the new owners did some overdue renovation. 

The wood burning oven, the sitting room, even the (really, really ancient) silver maple with my swing, are all gone. 

For the first few years my wife and I were married, I spent as much time away as I did at home. I was flying Navy airplanes, traveling all over the country for training and then deploying for a year at a time onboard an aircraft carrier. We may have shared a home, but neither of us really felt like it. By that point, the Navy had already moved me seven times, plus sending me on a year long deployment, and I didn’t really feel like home mattered. It was just another place to rest my head, and I was just as happy being on the road as being in our bed. 

In 2012, we moved to Patuxent River, MD, for what would be my last duty station in the Navy. By that point, years of stress and separation had taken their toll, and we were ready for a much needed restart. At the same time, we decided to buy our first home. I remember the red front door, the screened in back porch, even the master bed. And I remember the hope.

That home was the first place we really came to build our life together. We bought a red and white husky puppy named Nikko and brought him home with us. For months one of us would come home at lunch to take him out for a walk and play with him. He used to love licking the air conditioner vent in summer, and pouncing on golden piles of leaves in fall as I blew them towards the woods behind our house. As he grew up, he knew every inch of that neighborhood, and would lead us on miles long walks. And as he grew, we started to heal too.

My son was born three years into that home. We spent days designing every inch of his nursery, down to the sea foam green over flannel gray walls and the perfect alphabet pictures to hang above his crib. On the day we finished, he decided he was ready. We brought him home a few nights later. I can still remember exactly where the bassinet was placed along the far wall of our bedroom that first night, and rushing to comfort his cries at 2am only to find it empty. We found him on the floor. Nikko was wrapped around him trying to help. Those are nights I’ll never forget in that home.

At the same time, I used to get so angry in that house. I remember the water line breaking once, and I was furious for days. I stomped around the house yelling to no one in particular how much I “hate this damned house” and that “I wish we never bought it.” I remember the hurt in my wife’s eyes, but my own anger was too much for me to stop. I once punched a hole in the basement drywall. That time I limped to the hardware store, tail between my legs, and dutifully repaired it. I was angry so often. By the time we moved, I couldn’t wait to leave. I could no longer see the well trodden carpet where Nikko and I had played catch for hours, only the yellowed baseboard where he had peed when he was mad at me. I didn’t smile at the street where my son tried to show me all the dump trucks by screaming “dum fuk!” All I knew was the desire to be somewhere else.

We lived in two houses in California. Neither are particularly memorable, except that my daughter was born there, that I became close with my in-laws there, and that they brought me here. To Montana. We hadn’t planned on coming here, only leaving California. But the first time we came here, we knew instantly this was going to be our home. We felt this was it.

We bought a house on an acre of land, plus a little more in the back, with a view of the mountains out our back window and a neighborhood in front where the kids roam freely. Slowly, we’ve worked on turning that feeling into reality. There’s a burgeoning food forest in the backyard. We all planted it, together, although if I’m being honest there were varying levels of contributions. We renovated the kitchen and the mudroom, and are working on renovating the upstairs bathrooms too. Just about everything that can go wrong, has. The first week we moved in, it was -20 degrees outside and our furnace gave out. We huddled in sleeping bags with the gas fireplace raging all night, trying desperately to keep the kids warm while my wife and I shivered in bed. We lived for an entire year without an oven, and for a month we used our living room as a kitchen. The dining table held our instant pot, our toaster oven, and our cutting boards, while the four of us sat around the kids table on green, blue, pink, and yellow toddler chairs eating all of our meals. 

Yet I don’t think I’ll ever leave. I joke with my wife that I’ve picked the corner of our yard where I want to be buried. I’m not sure she finds it as amusing as I do. And sure, Montana is beautiful and this place has been really good to us, but I don’t think it’s this house that is different from every other home I’ve lived in. The only thing I can figure out is myself. Maybe I finally grew out of that naive boy. Maybe I finally accepted the world for what it is, instead of trying to return to Neverland. Maybe it’s not that I found home, but that I found myself and in so doing found home.

As Wendell Berry said in the quote that I opened this with, the world can only be discovered by a spiritual journey, by which we arrive at the ground at our own feet, and learn to be home. Well, I finally gave up on everything “out there” and found what is “right here.” It turns out, I needed to come home to myself first.