As the country begins to open up again from the pandemic, there are many opportunities to travel to public places once again. As a transplant from California to Kansas City, the Nowlins traveled by family van to the western states.

My home of childhood and adolescence, the San Joaquin Valley of Central California, is usually a welcome destination for me. I have many memories in Bakersfield, Fresno, and other places.

While riding my bike around my old stomping grounds, I returned to my pattern of locating memories, thinking about the good ole’ times, in the positive. Negatively, I saw physical triggers that come with uncomfortable memories of the pains that have made me who I am today.

As I reflected on these realities, I came to understand that home is associated with one’s journey through life. This return to my childhood home has provided me the opportunity to imagine its significance in a broader sense. The locations where I once spent my time were associated with specific feelings and physical sensations. In them are links to personal and family history. Geographical location and one’s sense of belonging are fluidly linked in a complex pattern of memories, family ties, and connections made throughout a lifetime. The first step of reckoning with the old home is locating the connections that geography has with the past.

Locating the Home of the Past

When we pulled our family van into the driveway of my sister’s house, I felt a strange sense that I was coming out of a time warp or a coma. A stop sign was present at an intersection that did not used to be there. The front fence was no longer the color that I had remembered. When we entered the house, the kitchen had been remodeled. The reality that this house that I knew as my dad’s, but had not been for 6 years, was very hard to swallow. I wanted to live as if my dad would walk out from the master bedroom any moment and ask if I wanted to drive around the corner to the McDonald’s on Peach and Shaw just like we had done many times before. The reality, however, was that he had divorced my step-mom 6 years prior and remarried within a short time after that. There would be no early morning trip to McDonald’s for me unless I travelled to the new home that he made several years prior with his new wife.

This had become very difficult to absorb, since I wanted to come home to find my California home memories intact. But, the reality is that the past tends to fall apart with time. When someone moves away and finds a new home elsewhere, life does not stop. Rather, life continues on a timeline of its own without regard to who is there or who is absent. To reckon with the home of one’s past is a process that must take place in order to be present in the home that one creates in the new location where home has been reestablished. After all, there is no time that can be lived in other than in the present.

When I was in high school, I used to spend time wishing I was back in the past at a time and place where I had happier memories as an elementary-aged child. Two hours south, in Bakersfield, many pleasant memories with grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins, filled my life. Until I was 10 years old, my family of orientation lived within 20 minutes drive of much of my extended family. But, this happy time ended when my dad moved us to a new town with no family. At the same time that this was happening, I was entering the age where boys start befriending girls with dreams of marrying one some day. I entered junior high, and with it, my parents separated and divorced. A lot of change happened in my family life within three year. I was never the same after this, as I would dwell on the pleasant memories in my old home with extended family. The brokenness of my family of orientation was too much to bear, and I could not see at the time anything worth salvaging in the present. In Fresno, only recognized the time that I spent with my high school youth group and the adults there as my happy place.

Memories have powerful impact on the experience that someone has when visiting a place that once was called home. If the times were filled with happiness, beauty, love, joy, peace, etc., then then these emotions will always be present even when the times have changed and people have moved on. But, if the times spent there are remembered for the unhappiness, or lack of beauty, or hate, dissent, trauma, etc, then the emotions affiliated therein will tend to remain connected to the geographic location for years to come. Most often these places have a mixture of both positive and negative. For example, the house where my parents lived together for the last time was a rented house near where my sister lives. I rarely visit there because it is filled with unhappy memories. Yet, the church where I attended as a youth was filled with many pleasant memories—and it is a place I drive by often. Apparently, I prefer to revisit the positive memories more than the negative ones.

The last thing that should be mentioned regarding the home of the past is emotional triggers. Triggers can take many forms, and they can initiate many kinds of emotions, actions, or inaction. One common phenomenon that happens when couples marry, for example, is that when traveling to the in-laws. In my experience, visiting childhood locations trigger a younger version of the self. As someone who grew up in California and transplanted in Kansas, there are parts of me that my wife will say only come out when we travel to my youthful home. I can say the same for her, as when my wife and I visit her family, something comes over her when we enter the city limits of their northeastern Oklahoma town.

I tend to avoid places that rekindle painful memories, and I tend to spend more time in the places that give me positive memories. For me, my sister’s house is the same place that my dad called home when he was at his best at any time that I can remember. Thus, I feel comforted to remember times in the house. To visit this house this last summer, I had expected it to be a pleasant experience. Yet, I actually encountered a mixture of emotions. I wanted to only think of the realities that once were, and no longer existed. So, at some point, the past needed to be left in its place, and the new memories being made in the present needed to be my new normal. That is, the home that I have made with my wife and our daughters is my source of joy in the present. I do not want to miss the time that I have with Denise, Faith and Hope by dwelling in the past.

The past still has an important role for life in the present, however. One lesson that I have spent three decades coming to accept is that triggers from years past must be reckoned with in order to understand what drives emotions and behavior in the present. The past and present are part of a narrative that we all belong to has humans, as it is what drives identity and purpose. When the past is accounted for in both the good and bad, then healing and reinvention of human identity can renew the story that our lives have followed. With the past in its proper place, the present can be lived fully and abundantly.

The Home of the Present

To reckon with the home of the present involves at least four components. These are connections made with other people, roots that form once transplanted into the present place of home, finding belonging, and commitments made to others. If one is willing to extend oneself outside of her comfort zone, the geographic places where one chooses to settle has the potential to be a complex network of relationships with people and places.

First, interpersonal connections are the bedrock of human existence. Without social interaction with other people, humans would find other ways to express themselves. A movie with Tom Hanks known as “Castaway” is an example of this. Hanks’ character ended up wrecked on an island with no other humans for a number of years. To compensate for the absence of human interaction, Hanks used a soccer ball, which was with him on the plane that wrecked and left him stranded. He named the ball “Wilson” and gave it the looks of a face with a personality. The ball was in fact a Wilson branded soccer ball. Hanks’ character pretended that he was in a dialogue with the ball as if it were an imaginary person. He even rebutted imaginary comments from Wilson. Hanks’ character made a home for himself through interpersonal connection by the personification of an inanimate object.

More recently, actor Will Forte played a character who was quite likely the last man on earth after a catastrophic virus wiped out almost the entire human race. In a similar way, Forte’s character, Mr. Tandy, found inanimate objects to place around an abandoned bar who he would pretend were his drinking buddies. Hanks and Forte’s characters display a human reality. We are social beings, and we will go to great lengths to look for social interaction in order to feel grounded and connected. It is part of the design of humanity to find home in the places where meaningful human connection can be made.

The second component to finding home is in dropping an anchor. It has been said that when someone moves to a new city, she is “uprooted and transplanted” in a new place. It takes time to “grow roots” in a new environment. Yet, once connections are made in a meaningful way, people feel safety and acceptance and will subsequently feel the desire to remain in place. They have grown new roots in a geographical location.

Human connection is not restricted to geography, and the presence of social media and other mass-communication over long distance can make geographical limitations seem irrelevant in the 21st century. Yet, in a healthy community, cyberspace does not replace physical presence of neighbors, checkers at the grocery store or barristas at the coffee shop. In-person connections still must happen in a space. Since 2020 brought upon us the mass implementation of online video meetings, some human interaction has shifted to remote settings which necessitate the use of virtual space. In my Kansas City, Kansas, neighborhood, my girls and I experienced friendship and trust with our neighbors in the summer of 2020. During the COVID19 pandemic, we felt a sense of home that my grandparents were more likely to have known, and which virtual meetings rarely accommodated. My family came to know our neighborhood as a place where neighbors help each other. We have made connections with nearby neighbors with whom we have no other link outside of the fact that we share a street.

Such in-person relationships serve to remind us that we live in physical bodies that are dependent and attuned to immediate physical surroundings. Virtual meetings are not conducive for bike rides with friends unless they have the necessary equipment and technology, or sharing a meal around a table. Physical surroundings still shape our everyday experiences in ways that virtual space cannot. This is especially true in the case where help from others encompasses looking out for the kids, checking the mail, watering the garden, and making sure that loose pets get back in the yard. Roots in the home that one has established is more healthy when the local residents share interpersonal connections unless we neglect some of the most basic aspects of life in a human body.

The third component of home is a sense of belonging. An uncomfortable place to be is that in which one does not feel wanted. Belonging is an essential part of how creatures find significance in the self, and in the other. This only happens in a place to call it home.

Before we began fostering our girls, I made a trip alone to Fresno to my step-father’s funeral, I recall standing in a parking lot near a street intersection that was once an important place to me. A close friend during my high school years worked at a local pizza parlor in this vicinity and got me my first job there as well. Many fond memories filled this place. I had established many close relationships with other people, and felt that I had a place to belong when I was in junior high and high school. However, time passed and connections became mostly memories. A strange feeling come over me at that particular moment that my connections were no longer maintained, and therefore I did not belong there any longer. I exclaimed to myself, “where in the world am I? What am I doing here?” My wife of six months was several states away from me and yearned to be with her more than I wanted to be on the pavement in Fresno trying to find resemblance to the home that I once knew.

Over time, I have learned that to drive the city streets and see the old stomping grounds of my adolescence does not generate the same sense of belonging that it once did. When connections wane, and roots cease to grow, they return to the soil from whence they came. Any belonging that was generated through those relationships erodes away to make room for the location to nurture future residents. Only the ties that have been nurtured at a distance from the new home remain. Family connections and friendships that stand the test of geography and time provide the renewed belonging to the home of childhood. But, the challenge is to learn how to embrace the changes that happen over the course of time while one has been replanted in a new location.

Acceptance means that home moves when you move. Home follows as someone moves residence to a new geographic location. Moving to a new city coincides with letting go of old ties. Thus, moving from a location requires letting go of the ties where such interaction is no longer feasible to maintain. One might best be advised to avoid becoming stuck in a reality that ceases to function the present unless it provides positive momentum.

In the new place of residence, one makes new connections, grows new roots in order to establish a sense of belonging embedded in the immediate surroundings. Meanwhile, the prior places of residence are frozen in time, while the long-distance connections that stand the test of time shift to include the unique experiences of each person involved. This shift of relationships from physically present to long-distance is rich with new opportunities that provide fresh insights and experiences that each one brings into an ever-changing mutual location.

A fourth component to establishing a home is making commitments. Journalist David Brooks wrote recently that there are four commitments: faith, marriage, vocation and community (The Second Mountain, 2019). Brooks further explains that there are two kinds of people in the world. Each is on her first mountain or on his second. The first mountain is characterized with attempts to find the best place to serve one’s deepest personal desires. Yet, the second mountain is characterized with the focus on the needs of others and leaving a contribution to the human race that transcends one’s physical presence on earth. Commitments characterize the life of someone on the second mountain. Thus, to make commitments is also to ground oneself in a geographic location that is likely to become an important part of what one develops for one’s definition of home. Selfish desires and pleasures are replaced by the drive for commitment to life for others. Thus, it is advisable to give up certain sentiments toward a childhood place if that might interfere with a commitment that I have made in the present geographic location, to my vocation, my community, my faith, and my spouse.

Life is an ever-evolving experience. Commitments draw someone to gravitate toward purpose. For me, the geography of the home that shaped my youth holds memories of how I grew up and learned how to function and find various personal interests. Later on in life, my home changed to reflect my use of these gifts and talents in my commitment to serve others. For anyone embarking on such a journey, this may require change of location, change of community, change of connections, and change to a new place of belonging.

The summary of these four components lead to a fifth, unofficial place of home. When I taught geography at a Christian high school in Overland Park, Kansas, I was challenged to help high school students understand the difference between place and location. Location is simply coordinates on a map. It is that simple. Yet, place is more complex than coordinates. Place is embedded in human culture, which includes use of the the space upon the particular land coordinates. Further, place is shaped by weather and climate, a history and a future, etc.

My example of this is the church where I spent my junior high and high school years in Fresno, located at the cross streets of Hughes and Ashlan Avenues. The building is still present at the geographic location, but the church congregation closed its Christian school 5 years after I moved. Then after another few years the congregation sold its building and tried to restart itself in a new location. Then, the organization was dissolved another 5 years after that. In this case, the geography of my childhood memories exists to the present, but the place does not. In the very same way, home is tied to geography only for a season. Thus, exact location is only but part of the experience; home moves to a new place and only memories remain of the old one. But, this is okay. Let us not grieve the good times of the past for long. New memories must be borne where one has planted oneself in the present. My own experience of home is now embedded in my newly adopted daughters and in my wife, who are my home now in a way that I would not trade even for the world.

In a future post, I will write about how I resolve my desire to visit the physical locations where my home of adolescence once took place. How I have come to peace with the reality that the geographic component of home is secondary to the connections, anchor, belonging, and commitments that make me into a healthy human being.

For reading on other topics, look into my other blogs for reflections on spirituality (singsilence.wordpress.com), life as an special education teacher in an urban middle school (mrnowlin.wordpress.com) and a blog on poetry that I have written (singlines.wordpress.com).

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