Posts on: a sense of place

I was going to talk about where we live this week, but since we’re buried under snow at the moment, I decided to go back a little further.

This is the first picture I ever took of The Boy, just moments after he was born. They had cleaned him up and put him on the little warming table.

I don’t know that I have anything to say about his birth that isn’t an absolute cliché.

Whatever clarity I’d had in life before then had always been fleeting. But from the first day I have had a single consistent thought:

“Try not to fuck this up.”

I don’t know what else I was put on earth to do, but I’ve never doubted that he (and his mother) are a main part of it.

We’ve lived a bunch of places, but my sense of “place” includes people as much as anything else.

This one is fairly easy since I’m at my mom’s house, which is the house where I grew up.

Actually it’s the address where I grew up, since the house has changed significantly. Growing up, that tree would have been fresh-cut instead of fake. The town has changed too. The restaurant where I had my first real job is now an insurance company. The grocery store where I worked is a different store and looks completely different inside. The high school I (and my brother and sister) attended has closed. My old bedroom is now adorned with Winnie-the-Pooh for when The Boy comes to visit.

But there has always been change here. I suppose the first that I remember was when my parents divorced and my mother remarried. Then they changed the garage into a den. The dining room became my bedroom (I had been sharing a room with my brother, who is eight years older.) The porch became a dining room.

Despite the changes, my mom’s house is “home” and probably always will be. In 2006 when my Dad died I decided I didn’t want to be home in Ohio where his absence would be all around, so we started driving to Massachusetts overnight so The Boy would wake up at Grammy’s for Christmas.

That trip led to this Flickr picture which is my favorite picture ever:

So this is probably as obvious as can be, but it’s hard to think of anywhere I have more of a sense of place than Home, especially now that I get to share it with The Wife and The Boy.