What is home?
Thoughts on uprooting, disturbance, and settlements
Kai has big feelings about fair-weather sporting fans. As a San Francisco native, he learned about unrequited love, celebration, community and disappointment from his local sports teams: the Warriors, the Giants, the Earthquakes, and the 49ers.
Your home team is always your team, he believes, even when you move, as we have to San Diego.
I’ve never been as loyal to a team as Kai. Sure, I still feel a thrill when Ohio State beats Michigan, or the Lakers (always the Lakers, never the Clippers) wallop the Celtics or Pistons. Though I cheer on the San Jose Earthquakes, I’m stoked San Diego is getting a MLS team in 2025. At a recent Padres/Giants game, I wore a Giants shirt and a Padres hat—a sport faux pas that made my teenager groan.
Those of you who know me, understand that I take little bits of all the places I have loved with me. No place better represents my eclectic self than my home. Beyond the array of crops thriving in the little free garden, and the plethora of books around the house, my hundred year old cottage contains snippets of a life — Eddie’s dad’s antique desk, my step-grandma’s muumuu, a Tibetan wall hanging, a Kenyan chair, an Indonesian teak table gifted from a former student in Silicon Valley, a old trunk that was in my childhood Ohio home.
This year, I have been thinking about the nature of home.
An infestation of black mold with a dash of asbestos rendered us wayward for over three months this year. Insurance covered our first six weeks at hotels where fire alarms and neighboring trains kept us up, pleather couches and starchy bedding made us long for our stained blue couch; morning dog-walking treks through San Diego’s Little Italy made me slightly embarrassed, like I was trespassing on the sidewalk that a man had risen a tarp to live.
Early in our exile from our house, a different unhoused man showed up on our doorstep. He knew we weren’t home, he announced to my neighbors urging him to leave. “I just want the cops to put me in jail, so I can get my medication,” he yelled. When the cops didn’t come fast enough, he began smashing our windows.
While our house was in shambles, and insurance money was drying up, we threw the dice and decided to still go on our planned summer trip, even though my parents called us ridiculous to take off while our house was being decontaminated, gutted to the studs, rebuilt. But everything was paid for already.
We had no where else to go.
Is home a homeland?
Tel Aviv immediately felt like home. Everyone looked like a distant cousin, or a friend from summer camp. The cadence of language, the passionate debates in cafes, the hummus and falafel, all felt so familiar.
The boys felt it even more profoundly as if, we all agreed one afternoon at Port Said restaurant, we were home.
An indigenous elder I’d interviewed this year reminded me that we are all indigenous to somewhere. And if that was the case, Israel is likely that place for my family.
Yet, I’d long wondered if ancestral homelands could be felt in the body, like if you arrived at the place where your ancestors once called home and you might know.
Not deja vous, like in Vietnam, where I had the distinct sixth sense feeling I’d been there before. But being in Israel felt like something deeper, like a settling, a rootedness. Even though we changed hotels every two nights, or had to research where to eat or what to do that day, or only knew a few people in the country—being in Israel felt like coming home.
Our ride-share driver had recently moved to Israel from Turkey, saying, “It is the best thing I ever did.” He was a professional back home—a chemist or a businessman, I forget—but now he was a Gett (Israel’s version of Uber) driver. Yet he argued that there are so many things that you realize you must hide in the world when you are a Jew. Here, he argued, that he could be himself, his kids could grow up without persecution. He was free here, he said.
Every Saturday for months, hundreds of thousands of Israelis had been marching in protest against Netanyahu’s extremist government. When we were there, protesters closed the airport. On the news one protester argued that Netanyahu would take away all their rights, push more Palestinians out of settlements, we might never find peace like this.
Netanyahu’s military blasted protesters with water hoses to silence them.
On a train to Jerusalem, two armed military guards were yelling at two Arabic looking young men. At the next stop, the men were escorted off the train, machine guns poked their backs.
It’s Jewish Disneyland, I had heard Israel called.
A student this past term wrote a paper about how Disneyland should stop marketing itself as the happiest place on earth. Too many babies are crying and food is too expensive to be the happiest place. Not everyone is happy at Disneyland.
Back at home, everyone asked about our trip, and I struggled to describe the quality of contentment and confusion we felt in Israel. Now, this feeling has been confounded even more by war.
F Scott Fitzgerald says the definition of intelligence is to hold two conflicting ideas in one’s mind without losing your mind.
Here are two of those thoughts:
Israel will never be what it was when we were there.
For Israel to have been such a special place for Jews, I am embarrassed to admit I only realized this in retrospect, too many people had been oppressed.
Kai’s favorite global soccer team is in a city he has never visited. The team is now funded by oil barons with unimaginable riches. The team roster features so many high profile players, not all of the multimillionaires start. Though they have what many called an unfair advantage that’s changing the game, Kai’s team won all major tournaments in 2023 and have gone down in history as the victors of our times.
This summer in Egypt, we happened to be touring the Valley of the Kings on the same day as Kai’s favorite team’s coach. Kai chased the coach into the tomb of a king whose claim to fame was enslaving, then chasing out the Israelites. When he got close enough to take a photo, security guards stopped him, a fifteen year old, from getting within spitting distance of a man Kai considered royalty. The coach was as enshrined like the tombs he was visiting.
Making a home in a new land
Back home, while we waited out the mold and window debacle, friends generously invited us to housesit high rent properties with incredible views of San Diego Bay or La Jolla Shores. The four of us would try to relax on the Eames chair, or squeezed together on the itchy uber expensive couch, but none of us managed to find comfort in other people’s spaces regardless of how spacious and well appointed they were. We just never felt at home.
Finally, after three months, we moved back into our house. We had new windows and floors, new paint, new pipes and a new roof, drywall instead of plaster, insulation, mostly things you could only see with a trained eye. But the house felt unfamiliar, like how a new gentrified neighborhood might seem to a former resident.
To make matters worse, everything was coating with a thick layer of dust. No matter how often I cleaned the books, the dishes, the air purifier, dust particles made us cough. Nikko’s allergies grew worse. It was as if changing the composition of the space altered our bodies reactions to it. After moving around for three months, I had a hard time sitting still. Eddie too, though he busied himself with the iPad, seeking and seeking who knows what. Kai’s restlessness manifested as him manufacturing the talent to be on three devices at a time—playing FIFA, while watching soccer, and fiddling with fantasy soccer on another. We suddenly seemed unable to be at home in our home and in our bodies.
It’s been four months since we’ve been back in our house. We’ve all gotten so busy with school and work and afterschool activities that we retreat to the solace of togetherness in the evenings, which happens to occur in our home.
I still am not sure what constitutes home. I know a place is not a home just because we put our things within it, or cheer for the teams that represent that place. Maybe home is a place, but I’m more convinced it is a feeling.
Kai’s added Maccabe Tel Aviv to his collection of favorite teams. He started wearing the new San Diego MLS team’s sweatshirt this winter. His allegiances to Bay Area teams remain. But this year showed us that home is malleable. We are malleable.
Friends!
This year I have focused much more on what I call root work than fruit work. As a writer that means far less social media and newsletter writing. Instead I have focused on projects that inspire like this story about Maui water rights, or this one about Big Sur’s Esselen tribe, this story about a woman in Belize rewilding coral, and this op-ed about how educators can use the Israel-Hamas war as a way to teach critical thinking. I finished a draft of my book, Mothering in the Anthropocene, wrote a column for San Diego Magazine, creating a reading series in San Diego called Wandering Words, and taught writing at UCSD and SDSU.
In 2024, my hope is to devote more time to writing about climate solutions, and big questions like how we might make a home in a changing landscape. While these dispatches are far too few and in between, I would like to thank you for being a part of my community, and for reading, always.
Hope 2024 brings you inspiration, light, joy, purpose, and lots of love.
~Michele