Coming home...

There have been few places that were really home to me, places I wanted to come back to after a day being a student or an employee. My home with my FOO (family of origin) had five different addresses, and I never wanted to be at any of them. I loved visiting my grandparent's chicken ranch, but that wasn't ever home, and they sold it by the time I was fourteen, so it went away. My first marriage had two addresses, and I was scared out of my tiny mind most of the time because my husband raged and hit me. In the City, when I was an oh-so-sophisticated twenty-year-old divorcee, nowhere I lived felt like home, just a place to perch before flying off to the next place. I flew from Noe Valley to Twin Peaks to Nob Hill to the Panhandle, and then to Hawaii with husband number two, and back to the City to the Sunset District. I tried coming home again, to the sister city of my hometown, to a tiny triplex with a washing machine in the closet. I was divorced, again, and trying to make a home for my four-year-old son while drinking and looking for husband number three. I had another abusive relationship before finding him, and we lived in this big house on a hill that looked really special. It wasn't. I actually owned three houses with my Republican-three-piece-suit guy, consecutively, of course, and none of them were places of comfort and joy. Divorced again, back in a dark little apartment, I was consumed with self-pity and marinated in alcohol, misery on the hoof. My bottom came in a little tract house I shared with my fellow drinker, sweet Leprechaun guy. Life there was fraught with self-righteous anger along with the ever-present self-pity, and it kind of blew up so that I was impelled into recovery. And my next address, just a few blocks from this little house, I hated for the first five years I lived there. Wrong neighborhood (I was pretty poor after the divorce), just not right. And suddenly, one day, I realized I was happy to be home. It was after one of those grueling hour and a half commutes which would normally be only an hour, of course, but still, that was a novel feeling. Then I moved to the house on the edge of the world, and, sweet as it was, there was an element of isolation in being so far away from everything, and in a relationship that, while it had its tender moments, was obviously not destined to be eternal. I would look out at our spectacular view of the ocean, the river, the island, and the hills, and know the impermanence of it all. I didn't like the little yellow house on the first drive-by, but the tour through it revealed it to be bigger than it appeared, and so very precious within. The first year here, I shared with a roommate, who was ill a lot, so I tiptoed and encapsulated myself in my room a lot, but I had everything a person could want in there, so it worked just fine. Big kitchen, with lots of lightness, acres of counterspace, a dishwasher and garbage disposal (didn't have those in Jenner, you know), ah, what joy! Then I got to have it all to myself, yardwork and all. And now, I feel at home. Finally. Because I know who I am. I found myself here, in the little yellow house. What a relief! I thought I was lost forever.