October 24th, 2012
“Maybe your country is only a place you make up in your own mind. Something you dream about and sing about. Maybe it's not a place on the map at all, but just a story full of people you meet and places you visit, full of books and films you've been to. I'm not afraid of being homesick and having no language to live in. I don't have to be like anyone else. I'm walking on the wall and nobody can stop me.”
-Hugo Hamilton, The Speckled People: A Memoir of a Half-Irish Childhood
Homelessness was never a laughing matter until it had to do with us. The absurdity of it yielded chuckling and quiet, shocked half-worry. Already nomads, we felt a little homeless to begin with. The Rodeway Inn, the second of three temporary housing situations we’ve experienced on our Harrisburg, Pennsylvania Spike, didn’t exactly give off that cozy, "homey" vibe, either. So when our humble NCCC funds did not stretch over the Rodeway’s request to pay for our entire stay up front, glances were passed between the eleven of us while our Team Leader fumed. We realized quickly that the security of a stable home was a luxury we would learn to do without for the months ahead. Although Michelle and NCCC handled our situation gracefully and we were never without housing, our traditional ideas of “home” had already vaporized.
To be brutally honest, the Rodeway wasn’t so far from homelessness. Conveniently located on a truck stop, our neighbors weren’t the neighborliest, and the lack of sidewalks along the freeway at the end of our driveway definitely put a dent in the property value. Was that blood or a mysterious four letter word on the boys’ freshly tucked sheets? And though many jumped on Andy’s bandwagon of blaming Clara, the sink was broken before she touched it. The biggest difference between Rodeway and the Day’s Inn that Michelle found for us last week is that Day’s Inn has the facilities for storing and preparing food. We can all safely agree that Rodeway’s (gourmet) microwave dinners will not be sorely missed.
Back in Vicksburg I remember playfully suggesting the concept of “accent mutts.” Soon, after spending so much time with such a variety of speaking tendencies, we would all be mutts when it came to language. Or, in Hamilton’s words, we would have “no language to live in.” Sarah-isms became Tanisha-isms, and vice versa, until everyone in our little unit was infected by everyone else’s isms so that a familial environment developed. Some gave a little leeway here, others adopted a bit of a twang there, and we all just accepted that John Joyce says “bagels” incorrectly. And so it began: the internal shift in thought, the growth of definitions, blurring of lines, to create our new homes.
Homes have little to do with the structure. In fact, we’ve found our homes by breaking down walls between one another. Whether we’d prefer it or not, the Day’s Inn will never be home, though we may call it such on our drive back from work. On August 13th we didn’t just close a door and open a window; we stepped outside. Travelers, wanderers, migrants, we find our permanent abode only in ourselves and one another.
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