Home Is Where The Heart Was

A personal essay by Tanner Weyland

“Home isn't where you're from, it's where you find light when all grows dark.” 
― Pierce Brown

Photo by Author

Dip and rise—the ferry slowly undulates across the windy bay as my wife and I stand by the guard rail. Snap a selfie—I try to stand so the wind does not mess up my hair, but—too late. She smiles and I copy it. Why do I feel uneasy? Seattle, the city we are leaving, is literally in sight across the water, but as the waves dip and rise, unease splashes into the boat, wetting my shoes and chilling my feet. Driving off the ferry, over the hills, through quaint towns with white houses and sky-piercing trees, it looks beautiful. But it’s not home.

Later, we sit, watching waves from a log that has been smoothed by one-thousand sittings. Peace. More than I had felt the entire trip, sitting by her with nothing to say. It feels almost like home—when can we go home? Away from the cold water, the winding roads, the encroaching trees that are so beautiful in the daylight but so intrusive at night—where is our home, and how can we get there?




Like many couples, we went on this summer trip to deepen our connection with each other and to make our home happier upon our return. For us, we had pulled up anchor and charted our course to Seattle, Washington, hoping for a cheaper vacation than Europe with a higher yield: fun memories … and a potential future home. Graduation was coming next year, and Seattle was a top contender.

Heading back to our AirBnB after sitting on that rocky beach, we crossed the bay in the opposite direction, with the rolling waves as company again. Strange, how a rented basement could feel domestic after only two days. Funny, how we asked ourselves, “Could we live in Seattle?” a million times during that trip—I already felt anxious about getting lost and keeping on schedule in that unfamiliar city with its wharfs, restaurants, and the Space Needle, so maybe I was not in a good place for making such decisions.

The Definition of "Home"

Photo by Maxwell Ridgeway on Unsplash (CC0)

Thinking of an impending graduation will change a person: we can feel at home in our dorms, apartments, or town homes, but give us a diploma, and suddenly every state, nation, and work environment could be our oyster: expensive, hard to crack, strange tasting at first, but with a potential pearl. Life changes make us search for foreign life-styles and opportunities-of-a-lifetime, hoping to find a superior place to the home that we have known.

Home: what is the definition of a home? Relying on the copious definitions and synonyms and Latin roots found in dictionaries will only get someone part of the way: What does a home smell like? Ammonia cleaner on counter-tops, or cookies freshly pulled from the toasty oven door? What does a home look like? Couches with unique, butt-shaped indents, or a floor strewn with deceptive Lego bricks and young children? How does a home sound? Bathroom doors creaking closed in the middle of the night, or laughter echoing out of raised cups accompanied by the scrape of utensils on plates? Or is that all just nostalgia? Yes, nostalgia—the reason why Stranger Things, Star Wars, Christmas, and “Thriller” by Michael Jackson all remain so fondly in our memories, despite their shortcomings.

There is no denying that nostalgia is a part of the connection that makes a house into a home. A friend of mine once worried aloud, “I don’t know if I will ever stay somewhere long enough to get as nostalgic about it as I do about my parents’ house.” He assumed that time leads to nostalgia and fond memories; he assumed that, so long as a specific location had enough of those happy memories, it would feel more like home than anywhere he would ever live. I am sure that he will realize that even our most fond places can change and shock us homesick homebodies—or as John Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath, “It’s a thing to see when a boy comes home.” And boy, it was a thing to see for me.

A Trip to My Grandparents' House

Think of a time when the thought of going home brought exciting jitters, and made you pack your bag faster than a speeding suburban: For me, it was visiting my grandparents’ sprawling house up in Mattawa, Washington. There, 12 hours away from my current home in Utah, was a small farming community that had flourished thanks to a lot of hard work, spit, and immigrant farm hands—my Mom and Dad moved nearby with their young family around the time I was born.

For the next 7 years I practically lived at my grandparents’ house—my friends and I played “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego,” danced in the sprinklers, trekked a mile into town with no one but our dog to keep us safe, and went on innumerable other adventures. When we moved to Utah, the distance tore a hole—a hole that was only filled when we crammed in our gray family suburban and headed back over that long road.

Each time my family and I went to my grandparents house, I was surprised at how much had changed—how the rooms got remodeled, how my cousins grew and had new interests, and how awful the WiFi was. But it was home in a way I could not describe, like a forest where I could name each plant, or a cabinet where each spice was easy to find, or a party where the DJ was always playing my song.

And then my home moved—physically, but more importantly, emotionally. I got married, did not visit for 5 years, and then brought my wife up to my grandparents’ house for Thanksgiving. My cousins: grown and gone, replaced by younger versions that my spouse and I did not care for as much. The town: smaller than I thought possible, and with fewer attractions than a water park in the desert. The WiFi: even worse than no WiFi at all because it got your hopes up … That trip home to Grandma’s and Grandpa’s house was like a twisted, alternate version of The Grapes of Wrath where the boy instead went from freedom to prison—and brought his wife.

My wife wanted to be gone after the first day, but we had driven with my family, so … no escape. No internet. No nothing. For five days. In desperation, I suggested we go into a bigger town one hour away and watch Bohemian Rhapsody—but her opinion of the house remained around the “he’s just a poor boy, nobody loves him” level. Then, a terrifying thought came to me: “I wish we were home. When can we go home?” My real grandparents’ house—my old home—only existed in my memories.

Making Port in Unfamiliar Waters

Home only feels like home if it contains anchor points that pull and tug and link the weary soul back to it. You can never go home—but a better way to say that may be, “You can never stop changing enough for home to stay in one place.” For this reason, everyone is searching for a better home: one that will accommodate their families; one that will match their personalities; and one that has friends and good neighbors.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash (CC0)

The search for a new home is like the journey of the Old English Seafarer, who said, “And so they compel me, my heart-thoughts, to try for myself the high seas, the tossing salt streams, my heart’s desire urges my spirit time and again to travel, so that I might seek a foreign land somewhere far from here.” Far from wherever here is, we have many seas to explore: the school-sea and the job-sea; the family-sea and the friend-sea; the debt-sea and the networking-sea.

In many ways, all seas can feel cold and biting when we travel them alone, manning the helm of our dinghy and looking through the fog for the first signs of a pale star to guide us on the dark seas. But the seas end, eventually. Sailors make port and hope that port can make a home.

Setting down anchors in a new bay can make the most adventurous sailors and immigrants feel homesick--making a foreign land into a favorite land takes time. We try to feel at home in a place with no nostalgia. We reach out to new people and try out the local restaurants, sometimes ordering in and watching TV shows because it feels too lonely otherwise to go out by ourselves—or at least that is how my wife and I once made do in a hostile land.

A Decision: Home or Bust

There we were: in northern Virginia, sitting in the basement of my wife’s aunt’s and uncle’s house, staring at a blank television screen. We had driven across the entire country from Utah so that I could try my hand at selling pest control for the Summer—or as the job is called by those familiar with it, Summer Sales. We were blessed to pay minimal rent at her relative’s house, but that was the extent of our good fortune. The sales were slow. Her family was … particular about how to keep the kitchen and other areas of the house clean—a struggle that had ended with me getting yelled at on my birthday for some tomato sauce smudges on the stove after a day of getting a whopping zero sales.

My wife, who spent most of her day stuck in that basement with no one to talk to and very little success in summer-job searching, was fit to burst, like a pot with too much water boiling under the lid. And that led us to that quiet basement, sitting on the couch, staring at the blank television. No more running from the fact that we hated the past couple months in that humid town, in that stifling home, and in those unfulfilling work environments. We had done our duty and, like the Seafarer, shoved off for a foreign place. We wanted a port; we found a storm. And with our thoughts and tears crashing and billowing, we had to make a choice: go home, and forget it ever happened; or change what we could and make the best of it. We chose the latter.

It has been almost two years since that conversation, and I still miss Virginia, and the times that my wife and I had there. The first two months felt like a typhoon, but the last two months felt like the storm had passed, leaving behind a calm, peaceful plain with plenty of happy memories and people to remember for years to come. I cannot quite say what changed that made such a difference: yes, I switched to a less lucrative job that paid more consistently, but it was still a pain; no, living in that house did not suddenly have fewer restrictions; and yes, we did go on more weekend trips to Washington D.C. and New York City; however, the mix of change and acceptance that we embraced was only possible because we had that conversation. Those happy experiences only happened because we decided that, through hell or high water, we were going to make the best of our situation.

Photo by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen on Unsplash (CC0)

At my grandparents house, I learned that my “home” is defined by who I am, rather than where I have spent the most time—I had spent far longer in Washington than I had with my wife, but that did not matter because my love was with her. In Virginia, I learned a lesson of equal importance: most homes are created rather than discovered. Creation is an act, a decision to make something out of nothing. Exploration is the hope that something of worth will appear in front of our faces if we search long enough. Maybe moving on and finding a home is a bit of botH—hoping for good, and deciding to overcome the bad; hoping for love, and deciding to create more love than what we find.


Image Credit: “White Boat on Body of Water” and ”White Boat near Mountain Hill” on Unsplash by Vidar Nordli-Mathisen is licensed under CC0.
“White Cruise Ship on Harbor” on Unsplash by Maxwell Ridgeway is licensed under CC0.