The pleasures of the harbor

Mary and I have been working on the yard this weekend. Weeding and leveling in 90 degree heat for Gawd knows what reason. Okay, I do know a reason. We’ve had unseasonably wet weather until just a few days ago so we’re using every non-waterlogged day we can to get the work done.

We were going to put in a new fence on two sides until Odin the Large and Lazy decided our disposable income should be shunted into the doggie surgery account. And the Boston bombers made it necessary for Mary to make an expensive unplanned Mom visit with Two. So now, we’re limiting our landscaping to jobs that cost no money. The trouble is, when you’re talking about landscaping, money and sweat are expended in more or less inverse proportion. Two’ s worth it; jury’s still out on the mutt.

I find manual labor prime time for contemplation and I got to thinking about our house and what it means to us. Just because it’s been our place of residence for twenty years does not make it our home, to my way of thinking. You can build a house but you have to make a home. And a home’s not made of framing and plaster. It’s made of comfort and familiarity and security and love and trust and a whole bunch of other attributes that have nothing to do with construction materials.

Nor is a home necessarily the place where you spend the majority of your time. It is the place to which you will always return, no matter what else changes in your life. When A.E. Housman wrote the words “home is the sailor, home from the sea,” they resonated with folks wherever the words were read. They’ve been repeated and paraphrased in so many ways and by so many writers not because we all go to sea, but rather because coming home is an experience we all know or at least wish we could know. Because while your home and my home might be leagues apart and entirely different in physical ways, home is a concept upon which we can all agree. We don’t all see a windowless cabin or an Italianate manse or a tract or row house or a mud hut. But we do all see ‘home.’ And that word carries more congruence than diversity in terms of the parts of it we care about.

When Phil Ochs wrote “The Pleasures of the Harbor,” it didn’t matter which harbor. It didn’t matter if a particular listener’s home is anywhere near the sea. “The sea bids farewell. She waves in swells and sends them on their way…” The traveler has returned home. It matters not one whit whether there’s a coastline involved. ‘The sea’ is where we go when we’re in and of the world. ‘The harbor’ is home.

Mary and I are downsizing our ‘stuff’ just now (the same stuff of which I’ve written disparagingly in earlier posts) both as a de-cluttering program and also to prepare for the day when home will be differently located. We’ll eventually move to a different house, most likely in a different city or even state. But home will travel with us. It’s a place in one’s soul, not a spot on a map. We will know it as the place to which we and our daughters and others will always return.