Sheltering at Home

This latest incarnation of my blog looks strangely like the one I wrote in Saudi Arabia—when I was pondering the notion of home. What does “home” mean? Where is it? What happens to the notion of home when you move halfway around the globe and make your home within a culture that is more foreign to you than anything you could have imagined? And THEN, what happens when you move back again to where you were born and raised? Is home a physical construct, or cultural? Is it about who your neighbors are, who you are, what the actual structure is—is it all of these?

My parents owned a real estate company—Kash, Inc. Realtors. “We Buy Homes for Cash.” So really, I’ve been stewing in the concept of “home” from day one. When my husband and I moved to Saudi Arabia in 2009, I had the time to cook and garden and be really intentional about creating a home. That’s probably why I was inspired to blog about the subject of home—because I was doing all these June Cleaverish sorts of things while living out in the middle of Bedouin Country in Saudi Arabia’s Eastern Province.

I felt a real attachment to that home, and to the one that followed a couple of years later, when a job change moved us a couple of hours north to the company’s headquarters in Dhahran. As soon as we were assigned that house, I hired contractors to paint the walls using colors more whimsical and vivid that I might have chosen for my “real” house. Weird, because it was absolutely my “real” house. We had no other.

The quiet of the night was eerie at first, and later it was comforting. I remember the cacophony of dove cries in the morning (my husband called them Smoking Doves because they all sounded hoarse and throaty, as if they had pack-a-day habits.)

I can still feel the soft heat outside late at night on our patio. Some friends gave us this ridiculously heavy bar when they retired. We hauled it into the sheltered portion of our patio and stocked it with the bathtub booze we all drank there. We had a cover made for it, to protect it from the fine dust that permeates every outdoor thing in Saudi Arabia.

I probably baked 100 loaves of bread in our Saudi kitchen, and we cranked out Thanksgiving dinner for two dozen friends. In that boxy stucco house we had birthday celebrations, game nights, and plenty of music parties with other expats eager to belt out classic American and British rock standards.

I wrote two novels in that house. That house was home.

Now that I am back again in my hometown after seven years in Saudi Arabia, I am selling real estate. It all makes sense, doesn’t it? I now make my living selling homes, helping people find places that (hopefully) sustain them and shelter them from the world—physically but also emotionally, psychologically, symbolically.

During this pandemic we are sheltering in the house that we bought while we were overseas, sight unseen, just a few doors down from my sister. I grew up on this street, played in the vacant lot next door. My husband remembers cutting through the back yard of this house on his way to St. Hugh’s Parochial School. Roots don’t go any deeper than this, at least not in American suburbia.

Our lives create home, out of whatever place it is where we shelter. Wherever you are, I hope you are sheltering in a place that you love, where you actually do feel sheltered. I hope that right now you have what you need to stay home, safe.