Is Home for Growing Roots or Petals?
Recalling a nomadic childhood, my sense memories are the only reason I know that I was really there
We moved a lot when I was a child. That is the short answer. Maybe because there were so many houses, I can’t pin one down as home. Maybe it is because I found a way to be at home in my mind.
The contrast between each place is more apparent to me than their similarity. In fact, I see each as so different that it feels as if I went through a portal to a different life each time. I wouldn’t be sure that I was really there, except for the sense memories.
This recollection of spaces (homes?) spans about five years when we were especially unsettled.
I have a file of different lives I have experienced, the people I became to adapt to each space I inhabited as a child. I can draw from those separate memories but can’t connect them. They don’t feel linear, and in the memories I don’t see myself maturing from one place to the next. It is as if I (as a growing child) wasn’t really there, although I can place myself there through my sense memories.
Riverside Drive
There was the condo on Riverside Drive on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, overlooking the Hudson River. The kitchen was painted…
