I feel stuck because I don't know how to answer this question. Where is home? This question always becomes exaggerated just before, during and after a trip back to North America. There's lots of confusion prior to the trip when family and friends from the US ask, "What dates are you coming home?" (Wait a minute, I am home here in LV.) But then I find myself feeling very at home while I am there, while still talking about returning back home to LV. What do you do when your heart quite literally belongs in two places? And those two homes are a full day of travel and many hundreds of dollars apart...
So North America feels like home for obvious reasons, that one is not so hard to articulate. All of my nearest and dearest family and friends live there, the people who have known me the longest and love me anyway. :) Those are the ones I don't have to give long-winded explanations to - they know my history, they can know from just looking at me, they just know.... Missing these people has been exasperated lately for two reasons. First, I'm coming up on four years of living in LV. When I come back for a visit, I feel like a whole part of my life is passing me by on the other side of the ocean. It's so nice to be able to spend time together, but it doesn't make up for all the everyday stuff I am missing out on. Secondly, most "family" we have created for ourselves in terms of our closest friends here in LV have moved away thanks to the economic situation. It's tough to keep starting over again, to make those deep connections with people so you can just call them up when something is going on without having to explain yourself from the beginning again. It's just tough.
But then there's that part about LV feeling like home, that's not so easy to put into words. It has to do with this incredible sense of homecoming every time I've been away and I'm landing back at the Riga airport. LV just looks and feels different from above. I feel connected, through songs about this place, through magical moments I've had in our forest, on our land, at the sea.... I can't say any more about it today, it's all I can really articulate.
So one is a sense of home with the people, one is a sense of home with the place...
And I'll end with a photo, which I was intending to post separately, but now seems to tie in quite nicely today. It's a photo of my favorite winter holiday decorations in Riga, the first thing I saw in the mornings when leaving the train station. (Luckily, I snapped the picture just in time on Thursday because on Friday they were gone. Holiday decorations go up quite late in LV, literally just before Christmas, but they stay up through most of January which keeps it feeling nice and bright on those dark mornings....) I love these holiday lights, because it's another one of those things that just makes me smile out loud, and think, "Cool, I'm living in LV...."
4 comments:
Hi Diana, glad you've started blogging again ;) I'd like to see you try to articulate your feeling of LV as home - because its something I (and probably most of us returned "trimdīši") spend a lot of time analysing and re-analysing - it would be great to hear your view. I can totally relate to what you're saying in the rest of your post!! But in response to your title about home being where the heart is - an Australian aboriginal (can't remember which aboriginal group, sorry) saying goes something along the lines of: "Home is where my forefather's graves are"....
Oh, more food for thought. I like that. Yes, I will try to articulate more. To me, I guess most of it sounds silly unless you have experienced it yourself, but following your comment and another email I received, there are enough people out there that will understand. Next blog in the making....
And what about when you're "home", but your heart is DEFINITELY elsewhere- but definitely NOT in a place that you would call "home"???? Oooh... my brain hurts!
I think it's interesting that most of us feel some extent of these feelings- and we all have trouble expressing it...
I so understand where you are coming from. I have not lived in Indiana for coming up on 14 yrs. But I always say, "I'm going home to Indiana when we make trips there."
It's a part of who you are. It's where you have spent most of your life thus far. I think my case is also a bit of an exception because when you are a military home, almost everywhere you live doesn't feel like home because you know your time there is limited. Our 3 yrs in California started to feel like home because of the family we created there. Surprisingly, Little Rock also felt like home. We loved the house that we bought. We loved our friends and so much other stuff. I'm still very sad we don't live there anymore because we left so much behind.
On the bright side, come June of next year, military life will be over and Indiana will once again be home. It comes full circle. Maybe one day you and KB will feel drawn to leave LV and come back - whether it be to the US or Canada.
Sorry to have rambled!
Post a Comment