All the Houses

At Home with Books: A Prologue

Last week, I announced that I would be releasing my memoir At Home with Books here at Out for Stars. Today’s essay is the first installment. If it connects with you, please consider sharing it in Substack notes, or on other social media platforms, or with an individual for whom the experiences of feeling different and finding home might mean something. This story is for anyone who has needed to belong.

It is my belief that the World (or, if you will, the House, since the two are for all practical purposes identical) wishes an Inhabitant for Itself to be a witness to its Beauty and the recipient of its Mercies.

- Susanna Clarke, Piranesi

The heat and the dirty dust boards. The disappearing furniture. The crying children. Why did I think I could do this again?

It was 2015. I was 38 years old with a preschooler and a nursing baby. The 1970s ranch house we had rented for two years in Blacksburg, Virginia, was unairconditioned, and the movers shifting boxes sometimes dropped them with an unnerving crash. My two small daughters and I inhabited an increasingly shrinking island–throw blanket, coloring books, camp chair–and is it any surprise that, melting, I melted down?

I thought I knew how to pack up and move because I had done it before: house, apartment, dorm room, rental. I was a pro at changing address. But I was also different than when I’d moved two, three, nine years before. I was older. I was tired. Everything felt harder than the last time, and I didn’t know why. 

The July heat seeped through the cranked-open casement windows as the movers closed down our life in that Blacksburg ranch, which I had never liked, for the transition to the Lynchburg Cape Cod in which we would put down real roots for the first time, and I couldn’t understand why neither my body nor my brain would function properly. I grew dizzy when I tried to stand and clean, hoping for a return deposit from the rental agency. When my husband met me at the hotel where we stopped over that night between houses, I wept like a toddler, incoherent. I couldn’t find words for why watching a room go empty felt wrong to the tips of my frayed nerves, or why I felt so hot I might combust. 

I couldn’t understand why I was falling apart, but I knew it had something to do with home.

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Growing up, I didn’t exactly live two lives, but at any given moment, I resided concurrently in two spaces. There was the one in which my body slept and ate and moved–first the 1970’s brown, ranch-style residence of my elementary years, then the two-story red brick edifice of my teenage days. There was also whichever home housed the story I held in my hands. I was always reading. Many of those book-built houses enstructured my imagination permanently. I wander their fictional rooms even now, decades after first walking through their doors.

Whether or not the book lies open on my lap, in an instant, I can be running through tall Chesapeake Bay cordgrass behind the half-painted barn and Gram’s kitchen garden, and up the back porch steps of the tumble-down Maryland farmhouse in Cynthia Voight’s Dicey’s Song. Or I might be shivering against a howling wind under layers of quilts in Meg Murray’s attic bedroom in the top corner of the rambling 200-year-old New England homestead in Madeleine L’Engle’s Time Quartet. I even find myself, all these decades past childhood, imaginatively gazing from time to time around the little bunny’s vast, green, fire-warmed, starlit bedroom in Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon. I’ve visited these pages’ dwelling spaces a thousand times in my life, and they have become foundation floor and bearing beam of my being’s definition of house, of room, of home.

But it isn’t only the fictional houses I return to. In a blink, I see the very real brick-apricot upperclassman dorm where I was accidentally situated freshman year at the University of Georgia; communist-era Muški Đački Dom (the “male student’s home”) during a sweltering summer spent in Dalmatian-coast Croatia; the suburban Atlanta 1970’s ranch into which I was born; the first house my husband and I bought, during our second year of marriage, in Blacksburg, Virginia, now sold and gone from us, but not from my mind. Conversations, declarations, emotions, and choices return to me, roll through my mind, making me feel that the present moment, here at my small vintage writing table in the dim, tidy guest room of my current house, is the memory. I wave my present location goodbye; it’s time for me to go back home. But to which one?

Often it’s the places I remained in for the shortest time that swing their doors widest. I can smell the mildew-laced walls of a sun-warmed 1920's rental, unsubtly dubbed the “Blue House,” in Asheville, North Carolina, where I stayed for a laden and liberating eleven months. Or I scratch my fingertips through the thick fur of a fat gray cat named Hazel, who, my allergies notwithstanding, once fell in love with me and made the feeling mutual. He lies blinking in false boredom on the orange patio steps of the expansive brick bungalow where I stopped with friends for a vibrant, formative ten months, also in Asheville. He’s been gone from this world several years now, but there he lies, waiting in state to receive my next visit.

I hear the crickets sing at dusk in Blacksburg, Virginia’s nearly hidden Wong Park, calling me out of the red-doored in-law apartment that was our first Blacksburg residence, not much more than a landing pad before leaping three months later into homeownership across town. The short stretch of time we lived there was in spring and early summer. On warmer nights, the marshy bottom that dipped towards the lower path connecting to our doorstep was alight with fireflies, magic in the air.  I remember incidental, fly-away details of conversations my husband and I had fifteen years ago, walking the paths of that evening-time wonderland. More than a decade away, I still live as though, one of these days, I’ll step off my present Lynchburg porch and be among those lightning bugs again, not here, but there.

Why should I believe so strongly I’ll be back on the streets of Split, Croatia, buying gelato from the downtown palace shop that existed a quarter of a century ago, sitting on a crumbled rock wall next to my new friend Adriana? In my mind, she is still a teenager, and we will pick up where we left off about her father, three years missing from the 1995 Balkan War, and wonder together whether or not God is real. Why this sense not just of past reality, but also of present immanence, of each cozy-cornered Cape Cod, high brick Colonial, or crenelated Medieval dorm building frozen in turn, waiting for me? I rev on some wild hope that I will return someday to the many places where I began and know them again.

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Indeed, something draws me back to the places I have lived, and I must open the doors, different as each home, as each history within that home. And that something is this: in the forty-fifth year of my life, in my twenty-third home, I have discovered that I am autistic.

When you grow up neurodivergent, but you don’t know it, you feel a pervasive sense of differentness, of not-quite-right, of failing-to-fit-in, no matter how hard you try. The lens on life and self is scrambled and cracked, unbeautiful, but you can’t figure out why. You sense there is something deeply wrong with you that isn’t true of everyone else, and you seek explanations. You observe people’s modes of communication, their manners of speech. You pay close attention to what the rest of the world seems to consider normal and right. And if you are bookish like me, you look to characters and dialogue to fill in the gaps.

Throughout my life, not knowing why, I have sought a home that fits and narratives that help me make sense. I have craved a sense of safety among friends, of okayness within my own skin, of acceptance in the place where I lay down my head, even before knowing what it was about me that needed to be accepted.

The experience of discovering neurodiversity in adulthood is different for everyone. Some refuse the label; it has been misused and there is stigma attached. Some deep dive into researching everything they can about what autism is, was, and might be. Me? The need to understand my past—its homes, my selves within them—has intensified. Why was this house so comfortable for me? Why was that apartment so painfully difficult? Why did I sit sobbing in the Blacksburg heat of that 1970’s ranch while the movers packed away my life?

I believe the concept of home is something that is built into us, much like the need for story. In the core of our beings, we need to belong, to hold each other in love, to “hand one another along.” Sociologist Robert Coles borrows the metaphor from Walker Percy’s novel The Moviegoer, saying that “amidst life’s potential for loneliness or despair, we are ultimately, and ideally, deeply connected to one another, always handing one another along in our journeys.” In all the diverse uniqueness of our being, we need people who see us for who we are and narratives that reflect us back to ourselves. If, most often, the actual homes that housed us well can’t last all our days, then the best places we’ve known–both real and imagined–where rest and relationship intermingled and grew, become not only beads of remembrance, but actual shelters on the trail of memory as we arrive home to our real selves.

So I gaze into the crystal ball.

And there is one house that draws me back, and back, and back again.

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