What happens when you don’t have a home town?
I have written before about the fact that I have done something very few people I know have done. I have lived for more than 10 years in each of four different states — Ohio, Virginia, California and Georgia. In the first of the four, I was just a child. In the second, I lived from 13 to 32 with two years out for Austria.
I was born in California, but left before I was a year old and didn’t get back till I was 40. We moved to Georgia when I was 60 and have lived there ever since.
Are any of them really home?
The picture above was the first house my parents owned, where we lived in Huber Heights, Ohio. The second window from the left was the first room I had of my own. Oddly enough, except for remembering the position of my bed in the room, I have no memory at all of what the room looked like.
We moved to Virginia in January 1963 and one or both of my parents lived in the house there until 2020. One of my sadder chores in recent years involved going into the house several times after my mother died and sorting through boxes to see if there was anything I wanted.
The last time I slept there was in November 2010, when I spent two weeks with my mother while Nicole stayed in California wrapping things up for our move to Georgia.
I found things I hadn’t known existed, like a mounted photo of the grandfather I never met. Charles Albro Whitcomb died in an automobile accident nearly two years before I was born. He’s buried in a Macon cemetery about an hour south of where I live now.
Actually, I have more Georgia connections than I ever realized. Charles lived most of his adult life in Atlanta and my father — who I last saw when I was 2 years old — was born in Atlanta in 1927.
Does that make Georgia my home state if not my home town?
Not really. If I live to be 82 and am still here, I will have lived in the Peach State longer than anywhere else. The house where we have lived since 2010 is the nicest one I have ever occupied. Our master bathroom is nearly as large as all three of the bathrooms in my parents’ house.
Our house is a very very very fine house, as someone sang more than 50 years ago. The only problem with it is that when you move into a home at age 60, very few of the milestone effects of your life happen there.
It isn’t just that. Neither of our two kids ever lived in this house, so they have no memories of Georgia and no reason to visit except to see us.
I have so many wonderful memories of my grandparents’ house in Ohio. I was a year old the first time I visited there and 40 the last time I saw it. In fact, even though the last time I lived there was when I was 4 years old, their house is as much home to me in my heart as anywhere else I’ve ever lived.
The last time I visited them there was 1985. The last two times I was in Crestline were 1985 and 1990, when we buried my grandfather and my grandmother.
I don’t know if I will ever visit there again, but I do know one thing.
It’s my heart’s home.