How to go home again.
A prompt for you this week.
This summer I’ve been so homesick.
It started, I think, when the smoke first rolled in from the Canada fires. I woke up one morning to that familiar dense orange haze and stuck my head out the window to sniff it — “Smells like home.” I felt a bizarre combination of animal-level fear and deep wistfulness. Millions of acres of forest are on fire half a continent away and I’m feeling homesick.
My husband and I left Oregon last year. As far back as my body-memory recalls there’s been “fire season”. But over the last several years, summer’s smokey skies turned into weeks at a time when we couldn’t walk outside without respirators, turned into “go-bags are by the door” year-round, turned into “my husband is trapped on the freeway surrounded by fire on three sides trying to find a way home to me while I evacuate with our cat”…
I’m not homesick for that. For all that, I just feel a profound grief. And I feel that grief every time I read the news about another eco-devastation. But I can certainly feel the way eco-grief and homesickness hold the same shape in my heart. To really feel and know that you can’t go home again has a very particular weight.
But somehow my senses seem to magically transport me home again and again, wherever my body happens to be. Like sniffing the smokey sky in Iowa suddenly transporting me 2000 miles west. So, I’ve been finding intentional ways to access my deeper sense-memories to bring me home to places I can’t return to.
Here’s my first prompt for you:
When I ask, “What does home smell like?”, what’s your immediate response?
If I’m thinking about home as the collection of various rented spaces I’ve made comfortable enough to live in throughout my adult life, it feels a little foggy for me. Everyone says my spaces have a very “specific” aroma - but whether it’s the weed or the paint fumes or the nag champa or the dirty dishes, I’m kind of too close to it all to really have an essential read.
But if I think about home as the ranch where my dad lived and worked for decades, the home where he would also die, I know exactly what home smells like. What it sounds like. What it feels like all around me and on my skin and in my belly.
A dream I had earlier this month got me going on this…
i dreamt i was walking on burnt ground ash dirt & concrete pads where home used to be now, nothing ash, dirt & concrete pads located just northeast of center now, nothing i make out nothing but absence located just northeast of center with the river at my back i make out nothing but absence turning slowly toward what remains with the river at my back where home used to be turning slowly toward what remains i dreamt i was walking on burnt ground.
I had this dream three days before the Maui fires. And the dream had felt so specific to my personal experience, my childhood home in Oregon— until the tragic footage from Lahaina hit the news cycle and I was reminded that dreams aren’t necessarily “my” story but “the” story…
But there was something exceptionally personal there, too. I felt an embodiment in the dream, a very present internal compass. In the dream, my senses were alive in a place I know well: home…
So I kept writing. How else can my senses deliver me home? It was automatic…
red kerosine hurricane burning dust on the window to the world knowing which doors to leave cracked open the calm when the field sprinklers first kick on at dawn. “the pain of losing home” August 12th, 2023
I wrote for a while, then I felt like drawing home, then realized I was drawing the view from my dad’s front porch. I write “I think the porch should be here…”
the smell of old oak in the sun acorns falling on lichen last night's candles & cards on the table plinking beer cans off the railing & singing along acorns falling on lichen just sitting and taking it all in plinking beer cans off the railing & singing along my dad looking out, smiling just sitting & taking it all in holding a bird in his hands, or drawing my dad looking out, smiling at night we wait for falling stars holding a bird in his hands, or drawing last night's candles & cards on the table at night we wait for falling stars the smell of old oak in the sun.
A prompt for you this week…
Whatever home you would like to consider, write some quick sense-memories of that place. Just keep the pen moving for a while. Smells, sounds, colors, textures, tastes, shapes, objects, relations, directions and dimensions and movements-through...the memories that arise attached to the senses… Then, take one of these sense-memories that seems most salient for you in this moment and use it as the first line of a poem. How does home feel for you, today?
If you’d like a musical timer for your writing, might I suggest these 35 minutes of Kiya Tabassian absolutely shredding on the setar (I was totally transfixed the first time we watched this video. I said to Neon, “I feel like a cat watching bird teevee, this is amazing”):
We all know the shapes of homesickness in our own lives, whether it emerges through fire, flood, finances, family, food, fascist politics - or smoke riding in on the morning wind. I’m sending love to you all. May you find yourself at home, wherever you are.
xo,
Such grace, yes. Thank you for sharing so deeply, Lisette, and for your reminder to be with our hearts and homes. Home has always been a somewhat elusive concept for me — less a place of familiarity than a moment of connection through conversation. Or steps on the way back to the starting place of an extended journey (now a different place, as "you can't step in the same river twice"). That being said, the homiest smells for me are probably to do with wood — from trees to beams to floors to (controlled) campfires.
Home to me smells like a forest after it's just rained. Interesting how for me now at my age, my home is here, wherever I am. I don't think back at all to my 'home' where I grew up. No good memories to be had there. Sensory, visually or otherwise.