I’ve been reading about home. It’s a thing of memory, writes Bachelard, and our first homes remain forever embedded within us. I don’t remember my first, we moved so often, but others that followed I can recall. I have to ground myself to feel safe. I do it wherever I am, in the car, in a hotel, in a holiday cottage. I impose myself on the space. I make it mine. And then when I have to leave there is that loss, akin to homesickness. Do others feel the same way? I am sorting out. I am cleaning out and ordering. It’s tiring work but there is peace in it, even if I can never get everything that I’d like to do done.
I enjoyed talking to him yesterday. He is not easy to know, I suspect. There is a slipperyness to him, not in a snakey or shifty way, but he has a front, a social side, as we all do, that I feel would be hard to penetrate. He wearst the manner required of him by his job, I suppose. But things are let out. A closeness to his father, now gone, a loneliness that brings him out to the coffee shop all that way on the bus. He is open and yet closed. Are we not all the same? I certainly am. But I enjoyed exploring, nay encountering his world.
