I went to pick up my daughter Rebecca at college yesterday. She had been sick all week, and went to the hospital the day before, was admitted, didn’t like the treatment and checked herself out against medical advice.
Unacceptable. I told her to wait there and I would pick her up and bring her to her doctor here because if what she had was serious enough to admit her, it needed to be taken care of.
I left the real estate office where I work, and headed out to get her. We made an afternoon appointment with her doctor, and began the long ride back. She was feverish and hadn’t been able to sleep because of a really bad cough- she had been diagnosed with pneumonia. She curled up in the front seat, I rubbed her head like when she was a little tiny girl, and she drifted off. As we got closer to the house, she woke up again and said, “I’m glad I’m coming home. I probably would have died if I had spent another night away.”
I told her that as long as she needed it I would be there, but I was thinking about that before she even mentioned it. What is it about home that draws us, that makes us feel better, that- for my daughter- is the safety net that allows a return to health? Having Mom there is one thing, certainly- someone to love us and take some of the burden of responsibility off our shoulders.
But there’s something else- something less quantifiable, less tangible. I could see it in my daughter’s face when she walked into the house. I could see that she lost the tension of being an almost-adult- the furrows smoothed on her forehead and her demeanor lost 10 years. It was as if the chicken soup on the stove reminded her of all of the other pots of soup that helped her through her other bouts of pneumonia. She looked around the kitchen and was drawn in by the ghosts of Christmases past, and Thanksgivings, and just popcorn and movies and snowball fights and fingerprints on the walls and the thousand other mundane things that a family weaves into a house to make it a home.
Sometimes I show houses that have not been updated for decades. I think the people living there don’t see the wallpaper as faded or the rugs as worn. They see their children writing their initials on the wallpaper at arm level- about 3 feet- and the story that spins off of that. They can hear the kids playing tag around that rug, hear the click-click-click of the cocker spaniel’s claws as he races after those children. Houses can become so laden with memories that it is nearly impossible for the owners to strip them back to the plaster and start again.
Rebecca asked me if she could come home whenever she needed to. I told her, “As long as you WANT to, you can come home when you need to.” I meant it, but the goal of every parent is to package up the feeling of home and send it out into the world with that child.

“Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.”- Robert Frost

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