Home, in one form or another, is the great object of life.
Josiah Holland
Mid pleasures and palaces
Though we may roam
Be it ever so humble,
There’s no place like home.
J.H. Payne
With the windows in the car down the other night under a moonlit sky that was still dark, air rushing in and feeling so good, I suddenly had this very powerful feeling. I reached deep down into some place within my innermost being where I discovered my longings for home were fulfilled.
It was something I just knew at that moment. I felt that mysterious “sense of place” so completely and totally that I could not imagine living, or even existing anywhere other than Charleston.
The rhythm of the road on the way back from the beach, the darkness with familiar city lights, the humming engine on the pavement, the wind — it all contributed to this brief revelation.
What filled my consciousness completely was the sheer familiarity of my surroundings that night. Also, the realization that I will very likely live here until the end of my days. I can’t even imagine any more moves.
The apartment I live in now is home. I’ve been here five years. I don’t want to go someplace called assisted living or to a “memory care facility.” I want to remain here until I absolutely can’t.
And I realistically know, as old age completely envelops me now, that “home” could be elsewhere. My current apartment home is quite small and literally filled with books; I live alone; and there’s no one to assist me when my mobility becomes compromised and I can’t safely live by myself. But I never dwell on those possibilities because they’re horribly painful to contemplate and would be last resorts.
If it comes to that I don’t know how I could possibly live as satisfying a life as I have now, despite encroaching feelings of loneliness often supplanting the gratitude I feel for solitude and independence.
I’m intimately acquainted with every detail of the small patch of marsh and tidal creek only a short walk from my apartment. I know every mood it presents at every time of day, but mostly late in the afternoons on countless brief visits there as the sun is setting over the marsh, and the narrow creek that ebbs and flows with the tide, and has no source, flow back to the sea as low tide approaches. It’s very sweet to live 12 miles from the coast and yet have marshes and tidal creeks just beyond the back entrance to my apartment.
In the time remaining this terribly hot summer we’re enduring (heat index of 113 F this afternoon), I will be coming out to the beach late in the day, or actually early evening around sunset, and sitting in my chair looking over the ocean, breathing the salt air, being cooled and calmed by a brisk sea breeze, watching the sunset, and feeling the immensity of the endless horizon that stretches out in front of me across the Atlantic.
I will be at the exact same spot which I have known for 60 years now. This place, and the summer house my aunt provided for all of us to use, are also my longtime home, located alongside an immense sea of memories.
The soothing roar of waves constantly breaking onshore will continue long after I am gone, but for now I can imagine that what I am experiencing will never be lost to me, and that I will endure in one form or another as long as this ocean itself. I am a part of it, and it is a part of me. The coastal beach town, and the larger city where I have lived for 32 years, are my soul’s home now, and until it has passed on.
Views along the path I often walk at sunset:
At the beach:
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