Where is home?

Learnativity at Vuda Point Marina in Fiji

by Christine Kling

Wikipedia says, “A home is a dwelling-place used as a permanent or semi-permanent residence for an individual, family, household or several families in a tribe.”

I guess for most people that question is an easy one, but it hasn’t been so for me for most of my life. It’s not a question of “where.” People who live aboard boats don’t see home as a place since our homes are mobile, and I’m sure I’m not the only liveaboard who has driven home to wrong marina or boatyard on occasion. For a liveaboard, the question is often what is home?

For the last 8 years, my home has been TALESPINNER, my little Caliber 33 sailboat. I bought her in 2006 after having only been a boating wife and first mate. I started then to learn how to captain a boat all on my own. There was quite a learning curve to that, and my little boat and I went through lots of adventures as I figured out how to singlehand her. I’ve lived in other places and stayed on other boats, but TALESPINNER was home. I wrote most of both Circle of Bones and Dragon’s Triangle sitting at the little typing table I had built specifically for that purpose. I was surrounded by my books and my few cherished possessions that fit on my little boat. I was at home.

Last fall my life changed. I met someone — through this blog, actually — when he commented on one of my posts. We started chatting online, then started to Skype and in December, I flew to Fiji and sailed with him up to the Marshall Islands aboard his boat, LEARNATIVITY, the 52-foot steel motor sailor pictured above. Wayne and I left LEARNATIVITY on a mooring in the lagoon at Majuro atoll, and we’ve been on a research and travel trip for the last three months. I don’t think we’ve stayed any place longer than a week, but as I spent more time with him, I began to feel more and more “at home” no matter where we were. Last month Wayne asked me to marry him on a hillside above the Maltese fishing village called Marsaxlokk, and I said “Yes!” So, now LEARNATIVITY will be my new home, and I’m here in Florida preparing to move out to the Marshall Islands.

This means I’ve been trying to move all my things off TALESPINNER in preparation to putting her on the market. I’ve been struggling with the process and feeling more than a little overwhelmed. It seemed like my boat carried very little stuff when I moved aboard from a two bedroom condo eight years ago. Now it seems like she’s a veritable little cargo ship! Where did I get all these tools and all this food? Did I really have that many books on board? What am I going to do with all this stuff? There is only so much that I can ship or carry out to the Marshall Islands and with each item I have to decide where it goes.

And like any boater, I had a very long To Do List of stuff I was going to get done as soon as I finished my book. I’ve got lots of projects half-finished and I bought things to complete other projects. That boat was my life and I’m finding it very difficult to just let those projects go. I go out to the boat and I sit and look around and I’m useless. The work isn’t getting done.

That’s why I decided to write about home today because I need to come to terms with this. I wrote about this struggle to a good friend yesterday, Matt aboard the sailboat MIKAYA, and he wrote back some wise words. “As I get older, I realize I can be happy and sad over the same thing, at the same time.” And that was just it. I do feel sad about leaving my intrepid little boat that taught me so much, but at the same time, I couldn’t be happier about this change in my life. The future for me has never looked brighter.

So now I’ve come to think of home not as either a place or a thing like a boat. Home is a feeling. I get that feeling when I am surrounded by the things and the people I love; when I can relax and feel be inspired. I take home with me, inside me and I’m taking it — and a mountain of baggage — out to LEARNATIVITY.

Fair winds!

Christine

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