I Have Loved The Stars Too Truly
My candidate for the Christmas song with the most versions this season is I’ll Be Home for Christmas. I must have heard a half dozen or so different ones. This is not a scientific study by any means, but that’s just the way it has struck me. Maybe I’m just focusing on it because I’m thinking a lot about home and what it means and where it is and how you get to it.
The other night I noticed a long line of commuters heading north at the end of a long day, the taillight necklace stretching for miles. Rather than my usual “How do people do that every day?” I thought, “It’s the beginning of a long winter’s night. Everybody just wants to get home, like I do. We all want to return to our querencia.” It’s a sweet word and one that gladdens my heart whenever I think to use it.
One meaning is from bullfighting and it’s the part of the arena where the bull takes its stand. Hemingway wrote about it in this way–“A querencia is a place where the bull naturally wants to go to in the ring; a preferred locality.” Another meaning, a figurative and more widely useful one, is “a person’s favorite place; home ground, a refuge.” My Spanish dictionary adds “homing instinct, fondness, haunt” and, apparently, querencia is related to the verb querer, which is to want or to wish.
This week, my childhood home, where my mom was born, became someone else’s property. Documents were signed, checks deposited, keys transferred to new owners. They’re all skeleton keys, because the doors and locks are all over a hundred years old. Mail will soon be delivered to new addressees. There will be new energy, new ideas, new life.
This is the home where I grew and lived until the age of eighteen, across the street from the cemetery with all the dead ancestors. My grandfather built it and he cared for it and his beloved gardens long after his retirement. My younger brother and my mom and I moved there after my father’s untimely death from cancer 1959, when I was not quite six, and we lived in the upstairs apartment. It was a place of refuge, a querencia, at a really scary time, and it was there I lived until heading west to college and adult life.
There is nothing unique about finally having to sell a family home. I have talked with two friends this week who have been through the same experience. Not everyone gets to have this and it’s not better or worse. Having to move a lot, if you’re a military family, for example, is a different life. Children can speak other languages and get used to different cultures. One can learn from anything.
I am just aware of my great gratitude for the sense of place, a place of refuge and love, year after year, where I could lie in the grass on summer nights and, looking up, trace the constellations and first experience awe. The poet truly said, “Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light; I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.”
