Thoughts on Home

In which I wax philosophical. Or at least emotional.

I have spent the lat week and a half in Cleveland visiting my parents. My mom received a bad diagnosis at the end of last year, and I wanted to come spend a good chunk of time hanging out with them and offering my support as best I can.

It has been a good week. I have especially enjoyed making my paternal grandma's sweet bread recipe with mom, and chatting with my parents when they reminisce about their memories. I did not know my dad used to bake just a graham cracker crust to eat, because it was sweeter than regular graham crackers (I get my sweet tooth honestly, as they say), or that his drink of choice was once Whiskey Sour, while my mom would get a gin and tonic. (Just another thing my mom has in common with my spouse, who also like a good gin and tonic.)

Baking the sweet bread was nice. I now have two bakes under my belt, as you may have read about when I tried it for the first time last year. I am glad I was able to do it with mom, who could point out a lot of little things, like keeping the yeast warm but not too hot, but if I'm kneading the dough and it feels cool to the touch it is too cold. Practicing the precise kneading motion under supervision.

Kneading the dough is pretty fun.

We also made the full recipe, which involves 14-15 cups of flour and a dozen eggs, plus flavor. We used a massive mixing bowl and propped it under the electric mixer with the dough hook attachment, and had to hold the bowl up with one hand while moving the dough with a spatula in the other, while also managing to add flour slowly to get the dough to that nice elasticity we want. I don't know how mom handles that when she makes it on her own!

I never would have thought to use a non-mixer bowl with the mixer...

Then again, my mom is baffled how my grandma would make as much sweet bread as she did. Grandma would mail us a package (we lived in Alaska for 12 years) every easter full of sweet bread, both in loaves and in nests. The nests are circular bread loaves with an egg in the middle. I still don't know how to do those, though I may look into it sometime. My grandma can't be the only one who did that, right? Anyway, we would get a nest for each of us (my brother, myself, mom and dad) and several loaves as well. And grandma gave sweetbread to everyone and also kept several loaves at home. How did she manage all that baking? With only a single oven too! We made six loaves and used both parts of my parents' double oven.

Our creations.

So I've been enjoying my stay. It's been valuable to get some experience with my parents where I'm not taking it for granted.

However, I've also had a few days where I felt homesick. And I found this odd, because in a way I am home. I'm home in the house I lived in through high school, college, library school, and my first few years in the workplace. My parents are here. Their cats are here, all three of whom are lovely (well, Buster is a bulldozer of love...) This is home.

Hermoine, the pampered old lady. She claims my room when I'm not visiting.
My parents buy lunchmeat turkey just to spoil her. Not shown: the white tip of her tail.

Margay, the youngest cat in the house.
I don't know her well, as my parents adopted her after I moved out of state.

Buster, the 23 lb basket of love. He does not understand the word no.
He also absolutely adores people, and will force his way into your space for love.

Sometimes he decides he's not doing enough and will take over my back as well.

But Southern California is also home. That is where my spouse is, whom I am missing being around. We have managed FaceTime almost every day for 15-20 minutes of catching up, hearing each other's voice, seeing each other's face, but it's not the same as being together. My cats are out there, my Kain and Cecil, and Aeris and Valefor. My housemates are there, my sister-in-law and her husband, both of whom I am quite fond of.

This is a strange conflict of homesickness. And it is not the first time I have experienced it. When we moved back to Cleveland after our 12 years in Alaska, even after I had gotten over the move and started to make new friends (a slow process for me), I still missed the Chugach mountains, and the moose and the fireweed. To this day I still miss those things when I think about them. When Aproustian and I went to Alaska for our four years later honeymoon, it felt like I was coming home, even though the city has changed a lot since I had lived there 18 years before.

When I came back to the states after studying abroad in Japan during college, I had an intense homesickness for Japan. The mix of architectural styles, the foods, the trains. Oh the trains, I miss the Japanese train system and having the ability to go almost anywhere without a car.

Home is where the heart is, the old saying goes. But what happens when your heart is all over the place?

My friend ZZ put it in a more positive light yesterday. Home is where you are loved, so if you are lucky to be loved by a lot of people you have a lot of homes. I like this thought.

Maybe homesickness is a sort of "the grass is always greener on the other side" thing. Things are good here, but things are also good over there, and I want to have what I'm not currently experiencing. I think that's how nostalgia works too. Things were good back then, even if things are ok now, why can't things also be like they were then?

Well, those are some of the things I've been thinking about yesterday and today.  I don't really have answers, or solutions, or resolution. It is just something on my mind and I felt like writing about it. I hope you enjoyed reading about it.

There are a lot of deer in spite of this being a suburb.
I'm still getting used to how frequently they show up.
But I still enjoy seeing them.