Home. This most overused of words. Like love, home and the word home refuses to be confined to a single definition. To just one word. Though we do try. Home may not be a place anymore, it may be a memory. Or a feeling. It can be the place where we first felt the warmth of belonging and safety. It can be the sea. It can be a scent. Or a meal.
Home is a metaphorical destination we’re always searching for, stitched together by fragments of moments that once made us feel whole. Maybe home is never just one real thing. Maybe it’s all the places we’ve left pieces of ourselves, scattered across time and space, waiting to be remembered. Maybe it is merely shelter.
We think of home as the buildings we lived in as a child. Sometimes we think of a country as our home. Sometimes we go home after a long time away and it is all so different we don’t even recognise it anymore, or how we fit into it anymore.
The scent of home. As Kenneth Grahame writes:
“We others, who have long lost the more subtle of the physical senses, have not even proper terms to express an animal’s inter-communications with his surroundings, living or otherwise, and have only the word “smell,” for instance, to include the whole range of delicate thrills which murmur in the nose of the animal night and day, summoning, warning, inciting, repelling. It was one of these mysterious fairy calls from out the void that suddenly reached Mole in the darkness, making him tingle through and through with its very familiar appeal, even while yet he could not clearly remember what it was. He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. A moment, and he had caught it again; and with it this time came recollection in fullest flood”.
It was his home that was calling to him.
Mole’s longing suggests that no matter how far we roam or how many adventures we undertake, there’s an innate desire to return to the places that first nurtured us. The timeless pull of home as a sanctuary. That moment of safety and contentment.
“Home is where one starts from.” — T.S. Eliot
I hope you enjoy listening to Chapter Five. I loved reading it to you.
Celi
PS If you would like me to record your writing - your story. DM me. Make me an offer.
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