I have always been a homebody. I mean, I love to travel and I like a good adventure as much as the next girl, but, as a cute character in sparkly shoes can attest, there’s really no place like it. When you grow up and make a family and have your own house and life, I suppose that, in theory, that’s supposed to become “home.” But, for me, I think home will always be Salisbury, where I grew up, where I know everyone, where my twin bed still resides and the yard I played in grows and the patio where I spent innumerable hours hanging out with my friends is.
Even when I went to college and then moved four hours away, I still made it home at least once a month. But, as you know, we spent the vast majority of the summer at the beach, and so, I have not darkened the door of my childhood home since May. Which is, undoubtedly, the longest I’ve ever gone without being home in my entire life.
Last weekend I started to really miss it all. The smells and the particular way the sunshine streams through the windows and the trees in the yard.
And all of this made me think of the book I am giving away this week, The Dog Year. The book, at its core — and in all of its rave reviews — is about loss. It’s about a doctor named Lucy Peterman who loses her husband and her unborn baby in one, swift motion, how she hits rock bottom, how she pieces it all back together. Loss and grief are certainly main tenants of this lovely (and, somehow, just so hilarious) book. But, to me, it’s also about home. It’s about the people we come across in our journey, the ways they change us and how, quite often these people become our home — or at least redefine the way we think of it. For Lucy, it’s a mismatched and totally lovable group of addicts and a supportive brother and his partner that help Lucy pick up the pieces, that create a new family for her and, ultimately, take a place of loss and desperation and turn it back into home.
So, while The Dog Year certainly portrays loss and grief and friendship, it also shows that home ebbs and flows, changes and shifts and lives to tell the story. It’s a good reminder that, at the end of the day, when the going gets tough, home is often waiting right there where you left it.
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A lovely post. I have very fond memories of “my home”. Our family has long left this house so going back is impossible, but I will always have my memories.