Love Is the Map

“I want to go home,” I say to my husband. What I mean is I want to age backwards to 6, to sled with my mother in the parking lot of Joyce Kilmer school outside Boston. I want to relive age 25, to play penny-ante poker with my father in his rent-controlled, bachelor shoebox in Revere, with the sea slapping shore down the street. But Mom died two years after tobogganing, when I was 8, and Dad drew his last flush a year after I turned 40. There is no going home.

Fifty-one years, 18 apartments, three houses, and five U.S. states: my lifetime, laid out in moves, laid out in landscapes, laid out in long drives and cramped flights, marked on a map by pins dropped in MA, CA, VA, NY, TN. I’ve shared homes with my parents and sisters, with random roommates, with one wrongly matched lover. Leaving my first home, a red brick house on a cul-de-sac outside Boston, led me to my husband, a native son of Los Angeles. He led us to our current home: a red brick house on a cul-de-sac outside Nashville, where his job relocated us, then laid him off eight measly months later. Cut loose from his income and purpose, we struggled to make money, to make friends, to make our life work with my research and writing. “I want to go home.” I said it every excruciating day in the weeks after his layoff. Sometimes I spit it and sometimes I screamed it. We fought, we faltered. I went home.

***

I live for a week with my sister, one of my soulmates. I swim with her kids in the Atlantic. We sit on her deck, play Scrabble and UNO in the sun. I relish their Boston accents in my ears, the evergreens encircling their yard, the pizza of my childhood rich on my tongue. I come alive with the noise and neediness of my sister’s tween kids; my husband and I had tried and failed to have children, had decided to lean into a life of moving and adventure when we could not conceive. “No regrets,” we’d agreed, but it is hard to remember our mantra at home. The week flies. I am afraid to leave home, afraid to go home.

“Let’s get you home.” My husband’s rejoinder opens my heart. He is he happy to move with me to the Northeast. He wants me to see my sister as often as I like, to sit with me and applaud every school play performance by my nieces. He wants to walk weekends with me along the ocean, to cheer with me when the Red Sox crack homers beyond the Green Monster. We put the red brick house on the cul-de-sac in Nashville on the market. Sixty-five days later, it’s not close to selling, but over those two months my heart opens further, like a welcoming home. I force myself outside, to The Porch Writers House, to Parnassus, to Novelette Booksellers, to The Bookshop, to Shelby Park, to Dee’s Country Lounge for whatever musician finds the courage and faith to take the stage Friday nights. I lean back into the adventure my husband and I vowed, make friends, invite any likeminded person I meet for coffee or Scrabble or lunch or a walk. My husband is a success at his new job. He and I garden together. We laugh at dumb TV, discuss smart books. We take a dance lesson at American Legion Post 82, where we falter out of step for a frustrating hour, then, laughing like teenagers, find our lost footing. I am home. We are home.

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