Once upon a time, a long time ago, a friend gave me a book called Home: American Writers Remember Rooms of Their Own. Feeling far from home then, I could not read the book just yet. I glanced at the cover - the shuttered window, a staircase, a Queen Anne chair – the bits and pieces of place where life did not merely occur but was lived with robust laughter, a few shed tears and always love.

While the book sat unread on a shelf, I happened upon a woman’s account of her extravagant purchase of a table she could not afford after separating from her husband. She described the profound impact of the table, now firmly rooted in her life. It was there she signed her divorce papers. sorted through her mother’s medical bills, and served a meal to celebrate her first book and new life. 

I once bought a great work of art to move beyond death. The painting, a collage of old family photos in the middle of which an egg had been drawn symbolizing the birth of humanity, told the story of inhumanity. The artist, a Dane, had visited Auschwitz. The more I looked at the painting, the more it held my thoughts, my dreams, and my yearnings – everything I wanted and missed. More than the walls of a house, the painting was home.

I no longer have the painting and I do not miss it. Perhaps that’s because like a friend, speaking of remarriage, said, “I’m home.”