In Search of Home

Yesterday, we closed on the new house where James, Truffles and I will live, and in three weeks, we will close on our current house in downtown Charleston, the home that was our last-ditch effort to save the marriage.

We had been trying to find a home in Charleston since 2019 when we moved from Raleigh, but COVID made things more complicated in that arena, and here we were, four years later with our new family house and a broken relationship.

In the beginning, I loathed this historic home and it’s 1790’s supposed charm. All the vacant rooms, an empty promise haunted by future family memories that would never come to be. The brick kitchen floor, unforgiving with every dish that slipped out of my grasp, compelling me to spend hours on my hands and knees, as I plucked shards of glass out of her crevasses. As sediment from the brick fireplace built up in the den, I imagined cockroaches teeming over the ruins of this antique fortress, while ghosts roamed the hallways.

When James’ father moved out, I moved into the guest room on the third floor and co-slept with my son; the master bedroom became a relic of the past, the king-sized bed, a museum piece, untouched. The house came to embody the decaying skeleton of marriage, forcing me to attend the funeral daily and tend to my grief.

It was decided unanimously that we would sell the home, this mistake we made, and move on into our separate abodes. But the house refused to be sold, despite all my efforts. And over the course of the following nine months, I fell in love with her, her wooden floors catching my tears as I cried in every room, her shutters fluttering shut to protect me from the outside world when needed, her magnolia tree dancing in the window where I write, and her garden, an oasis of speckled sunlight, healing me with warmth. Over time, she nursed me back to myself, and now, I must leave her.

Rifling through a drawer the other day, to find paperwork for the lawyer, an old piece of artwork fell to the floor; a sketch of James’ father with his arm around me, while I cradle baby James and Truffles sits (much too obediently for her) at my feet. It was a gift from a dear friend at James’ baby shower. And as I stared at it on top of the rug beneath my feet, I thought, where do you belong now? Where does our past go? On what shelves? In what drawers? In what box?

This revisits a question I’ve been stumbling over for the last few years – what is home? Is it a creation outside of us, a dwelling within us, or a longing for a feeling of the past? Why do we anchor ourselves in one geographical location, verses another one? Why do certain environments, such as pluff mud and Lowcountry grasses calm me, while arid desert landscapes feel like a living death? For me, home is by a body of water. For others, they prefer mountainous regions. How does this come to be? What does home even mean?

Over the last month, I’ve watched the night herons return to White Point Garden, at first, one pair at a time, and now you can hardly find a bare branch, as each one nestles in a newly built nest (the physic behind all of this defies nature in my opinion, as these are hefty birds on thin limbs).

I’ve learned, through the website, All About Birds, that it is the male Night Heron that selects the nesting spot to attract his mate. Together, they cohabitate with other bird species, such as Osprey and Ibises, creating a colony of nests together amongst the canopy of the Live Oak trees. What a lovely image, this bird commune, something I would love to create as well.

As James and I watched the Night Herons fastidiously build their nests, standing precariously on limbs as they tore smaller branches off with their beaks, pruning the trees, almost falling, and then carrying their small twig back to their mounding pile, I felt a little shamed by the industriousness of these creatures and their perseverance to create a vessel that would be so short-lived. Here I am too, rebuilding a nesting spot for James and myself, a nook in which to roost. Aren’t we all constantly building some type of “nest” in our own lives, knowing full well we will be rebuilding it again and again.

While I’m excited for our future home, there is still a lot of grief coming to the surface, for the family life we’re leaving behind. It brought to mind a beautiful line from Madelaine Lucas’s book, Thirst for Salt: “There is no end to grief, because there is no end to love.”

I still love James’ father, I always will. I still love our family together, even though it looks and functions differently now. But most importantly, what I think I’m finally starting to recognize, is the grief over the abandonment from myself for so long, and the recognition that I’m coming home, to myself, for good.

Here is Maggie Smith’s brilliant poem about the same subject that she shared in her Substack last week, “For Dear Life,” called “Slipper,” where she and her daughter found a shell at the beach, which they called a slipper, as she explained that, “finding an empty shell is like finding an empty house. A creature once lived inside it.”

Thank you again for reading and your support.

Sincerely, Kate

SLIPPER

BY MAGGIE SMITH

Last time I sat at the sea’s open door
I was seven months pregnant,
my son bobbing inside me and the same
roar of waves there. What I love
about the sea is its relentless
newness, the constant turning over—
mornings gray-green, afternoons blue
and glassy, the horizon wearing
its ridiculous white ruff of clouds.
I am becoming my mother here
in a skirted one-piece swimsuit,
my thighs glistening scallop-white
and tender, spreading in the beach chair,
my kids digging broken shells
from the sand at my feet.
My daughter gasps to find one whole—
a common slipper, also called
a boat shell for its shape.
Something once lived there,
something slick and muscular, a tongue
clamped inside. Imagine if I could
wear my home and call it my body,
wear my body and call it home.