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Home Away From Home

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I can’t quite grasp the breathless excitement of the writer when I find another article that touts the discovery of an amazing Earth-like planet found orbiting some distant star.

Typically the planet in question has qualities that make it tantalizingly similar to Earth – the size, the orbit, the gravity, Rocky Planet.JPEG-0bec9the composition.

But there’s always a deal breaker.

It’s like searching the city for a new house – there are always so many variables. You may find one that has the right number of bedrooms and the perfect kitchen with a right-sized, sunny yard, but the bathroom is a mess, or there’s mold in the basement, or it’s on fire.

Dang.

I’m waiting to hear about a distant Earth-like planet that is really like Earth. I want an ocean full of fish and forests with animals and a sunrise worth viewing through an atmosphere I can breathe. Knowing there is a far flung place we can actually go visit would make all the difference in our attitudes about deep space exploration.

Until a reasonable destination planet is found, I’d like to recommend a moratorium on use of the phrase “Earth-like”. In this case the headline should read “Flaming Hellscape Discovered At Safe Distance.”

Is there anyplace like home?

34 thoughts on “Home Away From Home”

  2. Other places might be home-like or a home-away-from-home (like my friend Lisa’s house, which was my second home growing up – I spent almost as much time there as I did in my own home), but home is the place that smells like home: your cooking, your critters, your stuff. It’s the smell you probably don’t notice until you’ve been gone for a bit and come back to it. It’s probably the smell of your sweat and your husband’s sweat and things like crayons or art supplies or fresh flowers or soap. I have noticed that my mom’s house has started to smell more like my grandmother’s did – they do the same sort of cooking, using the same sort of spices, and use similar soaps. My house will probably smell like that someday, too (once it stops smelling vaguely of dog and kid’s art supplies). It’s the sort of smell that gives me a hug, offers me something comforting to eat – sort of a warm lavender color: soothing, calm, hinting of an underlying strength. Mmm…now I want Swedish meatballs and lefse…

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    1. I am not very aware of odors. I think there are some odors that I that I would favorably associate with my home if I paid attention to them and if I had a better nose for odors. Mostly I relate to my home as a place I have made my own by spending time there. I have lived many places that I called home and always feel a sense of loss when I leave one of these places and move on to a new place.

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      1. Possibly why you are dragging your feet with regard to packing up the house you’re in anticipation of moving in the spring?

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        1. There is a lot of work involved in getting our house ready to sell in hopes of getting a good buyer. Also, we want to sort out all of the stuff we have accumulated in over 30 years of living in the same place. I will miss the place we are living. However, we have done a lot of moving in the past and I don’t think I will have an excessive amount of trouble leaving this place.

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        2. maybe it would be good to put it up for sale now and put all your stuff in boxes. anything that doesnt rate going into boxes can go to the curb. so one will be upset if you sell your house in december but dont want to move until april or may if thats you plan. storage is cheap if you can get your house listed in the meantime and put the extra 150 days of time in the market in the picture.

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    2. Smells are very evocative, aren’t they, Anna.

      I’ll never forget the first time I got off the plane in Moscow, it smelled so different from any place I had ever been before. It took awhile for me to figure out what it was that was so different. Russian perfumes and soaps smell nothing like soaps and perfumes in the West; much more pungent and heavy scents. Some years ago, I went to see the Bolshoi Ballet at Northrup Auditorium, and was instantly transported back to Moscow by the smell, even before anyone was on stage. A truly remarkable experience.

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      1. Indeed. There is a particular type of exhaust smell that transports me to London in the 1980s. The aroma of a crisp, September morning – clean air, browning grass, leaves about turn – is the smell of Renaissance Festival before it opens for the day. Avon floral perfumes with a touch of dusty carpet is the smell of my friend Lisa’s house when we were kids (playing Barbies in her living room).

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  3. back in my hippy days i traveled around the country and enjoyed learning about new places. salt lake city, denver, calgary edmunton, vancouver seatle portland san fransisco los angeles pheonix kansas city omaha are all cool biggish cities but the small town stops are of specail interest. someone once told me that new your city is not a big city but a bunch of back to back small towns. the little towns in montana wyoming utah colorado arizona california new mexico are very different form minnesota, north and south dakota nebraska iowa missouri kansas indiana are kind of like rural minnesota kentucky tennesee virginia west virgina are recognizable as america but they are a different set of brains than we have around here georgia alabama mississippi louisianna carolina have a different take on the universe too. i was stumped as to why cheese cost so much and when i would go shopping the stuff they were missing was often a surprise. the arts scene and book store kind of joints are around in other places but they are more barnes and noblish than the book stores in our neck of the woods. after a bit of being stumped it occurred to me that the best way to enjoy a different part of the world is to become part of the new world. its like going on vacation to yellowstone and being upset that there are geysers everywhere. all you have to do is go anywhere else. it has served me well in my travels to far away places and while i tend to focus on food being a vegetarian, its a bit of a concern to find dinner without being able to speak indonesian or chinese. but in reality i have never been stumped anywhere in the world other than henricis restaurant in bloomington in 1974 or 5. i had a waitress who had very little imagination and i swore that would never happen again. at subsequent visits to henricis the potato , mushrooms, salads, broccolli are plenty for me. how do those others eat all that and a 12 oz steak on top of it? in china i got an easy out for not eating the fish with eyeballs that freaked out my travel mates. the vegetables in china are wonderful and the way they fix the simpleist things (peanuts, green beans little cabbages give you an appreciation for purity of food) is a memorable experience.
    i felt bad about being a local and not being a world based being living in new york city, paris, l.a. miami or san fransisco all of which i would love to do an extended stay at but i really like minneapolis. i really really like minneapolis. the familiar stuff tha makes me happy here cant be duplicated anywhere else.
    dales observation about life elsewhere had me thinking as i drove into my workplace today that the world just wouldnt be the same without all the stuff you take for granted. a flock of geese flying in the beautiful v formation. really they all fly in v formation just because they do? the cattails in the ditch along side the road. arent they beautiful , the spruce, maple, oak, the everyday stuff. thats what makes the world so specsail and im not sure i could get used to going to the book store and having it be the cantina scene from star wars. they may be interesting lifeforms but a good old luthern or catholic is a tough thing to beat. familiar disfunction is a big part of life. i would miss it. a daily blog looking out hte window at the red sky with 5 moons would never get comfy. maybe its just me

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  4. Morning all. I am, at heart, a homebody. Like Anna, the smells, the feels and even the sounds are so familiar and comforting. Last weekend, I got home from Parents Weekend about 3 hours before I could pick up the dogs. It was the funniest feeling being in the house and not hearing any of their sounds.

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  5. I’m a homebody as well. I like visiting other places for short periods of time, but then I want to go back home. Much as we love to go to Mexico in late February, early March, after ten days there, we both miss our animals, our beds, our friends. The internet has made it a lot easier to stay in contact with friends in faraway places, but it’s no substitute for having them over for dinner, or meeting up with them for a play or concert.

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  6. “Home is the place where if you go there they have to take you in.” I had to read “Death of the Hired Hand” when I was at the U of Chi. It was very much about the sort of community and people in which I was raised. I tried to explain that point of view in class and got shot down. Over the years it has become a great favorite. (By R. Frost.)
    I guess home for me today is the place where all my pain is. I am having a awful day for pain.
    I find as I think about this that I don’t think of home so much as a house but a larger place, such as the environs around the house, but then I did grow up in the woods. I have no real feelings about the house we rebuilt on the North Shore, more about the North Shore itself. Don’t you South Side folks and other city folks think about your neighborhood as home? New York and Chicago people sure think that way.
    I finished “Songs of Willow Frost”, which Jamie Ford makes very much about a search for home or the loss of home, while making the city of Seattle a home. Seattle does have clear and distinct neighborhoods. I do recommend the book, but it has an unusual narrative structure. It is a woman’s book, not in the sense of a book for women only, but a book about women, or a woman, or women in a culture, a very male-dominated culture.
    PS Dale, glad you met Dale.

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    1. I see tim talked about city neighborhoods. I worked about 2 hours on my post because of pain and helping Sandy and did not see yours, tim, until after I posted mine.

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      1. thanks for the effort to post clyde. i wonder sometimes about how it must be to type with such pain. it makes me feel bad about my flying fingers and failure to edit because i am in a hurry to get to the next thing. i think the thought and careful words come from economy of motion. i am a willy nilly kind of typer who babbles on and then hits enter without questioning if there is a substance there you are the opposite. thanks for what you bring. i will thank you for the second reading of hte death of a hired hand. was it 6 minths ago uyou mentioned it. what a lovely story about a ethic we all knew growing up but dont see too much today. kepp fighting through the pain.. for us. i apprecaite it.

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    2. I am a Southwest Minneapolis kid. It is my small town. When I bought our current house, the first thing that friends who grew up in this part of Mpls wanted to know was whether the “red haired librarian” was still working at our local branch (yes she was, she has since retired). My daughter goes to elementary school on the same corner where my dad did (same school name, newer building). The grocery store has changed hands a couple of times, but its current state is as friendly and neighborly as what it was when I was a kid. And home doesn’t feel like “home” to me unless I have water and non-lawn green space nearby (growing up it was Lake Harriet and the Rose Gardens a couple blocks away, now it’s Minnehaha Creek with Lake Harriet within a mile). So, yeah, I agree Clyde, “home: is more than the space enclosed by a dwelling.

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    3. In our family the people who have to take you in are other family members. We have helped out people in our family and i have always been able to count on my parents and other family members to help me. I don’t expect much from people who aren’t related to me. I have found that there are other people I can sometimes count on outside of my family. I would like to think of a community as my home. I do like to help others in my community. When it comes right down a critical need, it is only my family that I can completely count on for help.

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    4. I think of The West Side as home. Not to be confused with West St. Paul which it abuts. The West Side is part of the City of St. Paul whereas West St. Paul is a suburb. When artists from other places are performing in St. Paul and make the mistake of announcing from the stage that they’re glad to be in Minneapolis, someone is sure to point out that they’re not. Same thing with The West Side. It’s usually people from Minneapolis who are little confused about this distinction.

      Talking about neighborhoods, a friend of mine lives in the Seward neighborhood in Minneapolis where she bought a condo a couple of years ago. She was mugged right in front of her condo last night, and the thugs took off with her purse with everything in it: her phone, nook, keys, credit cards and driver’s license plus what little cash she carried. That seems like such a violation of “home.”

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      1. Sorry to hear about your friend, PJ. Seward is a mix of everything and I guess that mixture includes safe and non-as-safe. My son lives there and I don’t worry too much about his safety (or mine when I’m there) but I’m generally not a worrier. Worrying doesn’t make you any happier or safer (except for a more watchful and paranoid eye on your surroundings).

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        1. I agree, Lisa, worrying doesn’t help at all. My friend has actually lived in the neighborhood as a renter for 25 years, so she is also very comfortable there. She doesn’t drive, but walks, bikes, or takes the bus to wherever she’s going. She considers herself lucky that she’s only bruised, and knows it could have been so much worse. Still, how can an incident like that not affect you?

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  7. I would say that my sister’s home is the closest to home for me. I could probably stay there indefinitely (except for missing all my friends and activities here) and I feel completely comfortable there (the Berkshires in Massachusetts).
    I’ve been in this house 35 years and whenever my downsizing-condo-thinking friends ask how long I plan to stay in it, I can’t imagine moving.

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  8. Home was so inviting this morning that I took off part of the morning for a mental health break. That extra hour of sleep was just what I needed.

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  9. Definitely the surrounding outdoors is part of home for me – when I think of, especially, my child hood homes, I remember more about the outdoors than indoors for some of them. Let’s see, what was the question?

    Has anyone read Thomas Wolfe’s You Can’t Go Home Again? Should I add it to my list?

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    2. Did a graduate paper on Thomas Wolfe, for which read all 4 books. Sort of. A man out of control, but interesting. Not a stable man. When his edit Perkins told him to cut, he added. The book is a tirade against his home town. Moments of brilliant prose separated by a brain gone wild.

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  10. TOT (tangentially on topic): There are many things my mom is currently unaware of, unless we tell her: where she is (transitional care) and why she’s there (rehabilitating after a fall), but she really gets that this is NOT home. In her new place, some of the current troubles will remain – she’ll need help to get up and down, and to walk. There will be an adjustable (hospital) bed, and a wheel chair, most likely for the rest of her life. But the new place will, I fervently hope, become home – she will have consistent caretakers who will WANT to learn how she operates, and how to “read” her. She will feel some kind of belonging.

    So belonging is another factor in Home, for me. When I lived alone, I felt like I belonged in my community, and to my cats. When I’ve lived with family, there’s that aspect of “they have to take you in”… you can mess up, and still come home. Usually.

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  11. the band i was associated with in the hippy rock and roll days was called “home” we would laugh because we would inevitably be introduced as “the home” or some variation. the gut who was the conceptual brain and driver of the band was a guy who turned out to be quite an artist in the world of sculpture. has taught and trained lots of artists for the world stage. i went through the walker with him and he pointed out the work of his proteges., he was looking for a name of the band when they dumped the singer organist as their front man and sought a new identity. they went through the book of quotes and discovered that the main topic other than love was home. home is where the heart is etc,. they thought about it and thus the name. home has a special place for me on a couple levels. .

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