Home is a difficult concept for me. I’ve moved a lot throughout my life and there’s never really been one physical location that I could point to and call “home.” Most of my definition of the concept of home revolves around identity rather than place. Wherever my family is, that’s where I call home, and the places that I most strongly associate with family are the places most likely to be identified as home.
For years, Windy Ridge Farm in Union, West Virginia was the place I looked to as home. It was my mother’s parents home and, while my mother and I only ever lived there intermittently, my grandparents had lived there for decades by the time I was born. It was a reliable place—a place that I thought I could always go back to. Its rolling limestone hills, stolid cattle, and brilliant autumns were there for me any time I turned my back on a new old place of residence.
My grandfather fell ill in my late teen years and he and my grandmother moved into a new house in Charleston, West Virginia so that he could be close to a hospital. He died in that house and, though she maintained ownership of Windy Ridge, my grandmother never moved back to it. Over the course of about a decade, the farm fell into heavy disrepair. Every time I visited it it looked more and more like a funhouse mirror image of home. Last year my grandmother sold the farm to an out-of-stater.
The last thing my family did before leaving after packing our belongings was say goodbye to my great-grandparents graves in a cemetery looking backward onto the farm. They had only really lived in Union for a short time before dying. They had essentially moved there to be buried there. Close to family. Their gravestones were the only ones in the entire town that belonged to relatives of mine. It really put the concept of “home” and “belonging” into perspective for me when I saw their little graves surrounded by row after row of the same names that had nothing to do with mine. To me, Windy Ridge was the most permanent origin I could point back to. To the people of Union, my family had nothing to do with that old farm. They were a blip on the radar. Here and then gone. And my great-grandparents saw it as the end of their lives. Place is Proteus. It changes constantly for every person looking at it and no person could ever agree with another about what they’re looking at, even if they think that they’re looking at home.
