January 19, 2009
Is it possible
I feel homesick for a place where I only spent 38 days? This morning I was taking my morning walk in my sandals instead of my usual tennis shoes. I thought about heading into the long climb from Pietà into Floriana, with parkland (and beyond that, a marina) to one side and the Ta’Braxia Cemetery to the other, in these very sandals. I often find myself thinking about my time in Malta.
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It is most certainly possible — and for certain of us, virtually inevitable. I wept on leaving Borrego Springs, California after my first (four-day) visit over a dozen years ago, and today, after a handful of lengthier stays and two failed attempts to build or to buy a dwelling there, I still pine.
I also yearn for the Mani region at the southernmost tip of the Peloponnese, where I spent only three or four days.
And my throat constricts when I think of certain spots in Mexico.
But I am never ever ever homesick for Dallas, Texas.
Sometimes I miss Winona, MN where I worked for a summer. I just can’t shake the memory of this one bar.
Just don’t twist your ankle while you’re walking and thinking about Malta, Coop.
Cooper, places I visit touch me and live in me. There are two places that I feel I truly belong. Neither are here in England.
The first is the USA – I have had many wonderful times there, it still fills me with joy and a desire to be there – my love affair started in 1980, when, as a police officer I was so taken with the place that I wrote to the New York Police Department wanting to know how I could be a police officer there. It was a real kick in the teeth to know that it was impossible unless I was an American citizen. I have carried that ever since but love the USA so damn much.
The second is the Greek island of Crete – I don’t know what it is – when there, no other place exists. I have always felt totally at peace with myself.
Place can have peculiar dynamics. My relationship with New York, for instance, has had many arcs and swoops, from first delirious love affair, to next delirious love affair, to this kind of more complex, deepening love affair that seems to have been happening over the past year.
But living in Denmark, and my consequent relationship with my home country, Ireland, have really broadened my sense of what it is to live in a place. It’s not always about the honeymoon or loveloveloving the place you live in, it’s about living in it. Abiding in it, and abiding it.
I think a person is made of so many places, and sometimes those we don’t see very often call to us from so deeply inside us that they must be home.
Lucy – I love what you wrote. In Many ways it said what I was unable to. Thank you.