October Homesickness

There is always something nice and safe about viewing the world as a child, and we keep a small kernel of this in later years through our memories of our childhood. The last paragraph of George Moore’s “Homesickness” is by far one of my favorite passages that we have read in my Modern Irish Identity class:

Well, he would like to be buried in the village where he was born. There is an unchanging, silent life within every man that none knows but himself, and his unchanging silent life was his memory of Margaret Dirken. The barroom was forgotten and all that concerned it, and the things he saw most clearly were the green hillside, and the bog lake and the rushes about it, and the greater lake in the distance, and behind it the blue line of the wandering hills.

While we may deny the internal quiet and peace that we subconsciously feel when seeing the place where we grew up, it will find us in the end, and ultimately, this nostalgia is what our being prefers to any other standard of life that we have chosen, made, or been victim to through the years. Despite desolation or squalor, no matter any tensions in the house or sorrows in the neighborhood streets, home is home; the rougher parts of home are romanticized away and idealized, making ideal fodder for later poems and memoirs, or writing the great American novel. The better times are lionized and told as funny or heroic tales to the grandchildren.

High school was fun, but I remember being so eager to leave Boise and get out into a bigger city in a different state, to be an individual, to see and fix the entire world because that’s just the kind of idealistic teenager I was. Today I’m a senior in college, and dammit, I miss home right now. It’s not really that far away, just a two hour flight, and it’s not as if I haven’t been home in years like some characters I read about in books or on the news; I’ve just been waiting to see home lately. It takes a few years away to begin to form that secret inner life that Moore speaks of, and reading that passage made me realize that I’ve finally formed mine.

Maybe it’s the onset of fall, with the cooler temperatures and occasional falling leaf to remind me of Octobers in the northwest, with colorful leaves blanketing the ground and the mountains brown and musky green with the coming of winter. There is a crisp edge to a real October day, a chill that cuts into your nose yet still leaves you with the lingering scent of pies and the faint smoky aroma of burning pine wood and leaf-piles.

I think the dropping thermometers also trigger my Idaho-bred “MUST SKI NOW” hormone…

Maybe I’m romanticizing, but it’s a nice feeling. And I sure can’t wait to fly home for Thanksgiving.

N.