Home Pieces

A few posts ago, I wrote about not feeling like I have a family home to go to and how my maiden name feels like a homecoming. On my recent trip to California, I found a few more pieces of home.

My kids and I flew to the San Jose airport and spent the first three days of our trip in Portola Valley. My mom has worked at Woodside Priory School there for over twenty years (this is mind boggling to me). We moved on to the campus when I was ten, and I lived there until about my sophomore year of college. My mom still lives there but in a new location so that I thought certainly my home is no longer there. But watching my kids walk around the campus - like they owned it, as kids will - swimming in the school pool with them, tromping the big hill, playing outside in view of Windy Hill (pictured), smelling the wonderful smell of dried grass and oak trees, I felt home. I felt that sweetness of my kids walking where I walked, discovering warm steps and walkways that I walked in the dreaminess of childhood.

On a run one evening in Portola Valley, I found my way again along familiar trails; crushed the golden dry grass that reminded me of playing light and dark games with Jen in the hills behind her house; ran past the pool where we used to swim in the summers (me off and on trying to avoid the adolescent boys when the Priory was an all boys school and where I once sat on gym roof overlooking the pool eating fresh doughnuts at midnight with my best friend, James) and a one room apartment over a garage on the Priory campus where my mom and sister Lesley lived for awhile and where I once raked leaves for woman who worked at the Priory and had been severly burned in a fire on the campus started by an electric blanket (I remember her disfigured face and the smell of medicine and damp in her house when I went to collect the money she paid me to rake). I continued down the gravel path that I used to ride my bike on to school, where once, in fifth grade, two boys had blocked my way with their bikes and teased me, where I used to walk when my parents fight, where there used to be two blue healers who barked viciously at passersby. I ran past the elementary school where I attended fifth grade and admired the face lift. I remembered where to turn to continue up a hill, past a house where my friend Katie Collins used to live, down a hill and past a house where Darcy used to live (Darcy who was obsessed with "Gone with the Wind" and named her two golden retrievers Rhett Mutler and Scarlett O'Hairy) and to a trail that led past blackberry bushes and back to the Priory where I one walked holding hands with my first boyfriend.

I don't have a home structure to return to in Portola Valley - though my mom's apartment is quite lovely, and I could sit all day in her living room listening to her fountain and watching the humming birds in her garden - but there is home at the Priory, the memories of childhood and adolescence, the familiar paths and smells, a place where my life was built and where I love to watch my own kids play.