Finding Home
KnotMag Says Goodbye
Features
I seem to have misplaced my speech.
8.6.2004Jennie Dorris
Finding Home
Home is where you might get eaten
Features
My home is the small plot of wilderness in Minnesota, which mostly consists of 6 inches of topsoil resting on solid rock. Low-lying areas are constantly muddy, and trees planted in rigid rows replace logged-out areas that border the land to the north. In addition, you may have heard that Minnesota has a mosquito problem; the wise always carry head netting. My home is not perfect, but it's wild.
8.4.2004Michael Corey
Finding Home
Nocturnal Siesta
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But that's the thing: everything's still about later. With your hopeful career in entertainment on hold, Sara back east, and all the work toward another degree, you feel like you're not even going to exist for two years, and you hope to God this is all worth it by then.
8.2.2004Dave Burdick
Finding Home
Finding Oz
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Yet, still the older I get, something still doesn’t feel right. Now and then the concrete jungle feels like a cage and I get anxious. Needing some time away from my new home in order to look at it objectively, I did the impossible. I hopped a flight to Detroit. I went home.
7.31.2004Tracy Weiss
Finding Home
Solo Summer
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There are some things I am very clear about. I want a dachshund with his name spelled out on a rhinestone-studded collar whom I will boost onto the couch beside me as we watch Everwood or Without a Trace together. I want a boyfriend who sends me witty e-mails and never calls before 10:00am. I want a comfortable couch that doesn't make me feel as if my life is a failure when I look at its mashed-down cushions and threadbare green-yellow embossed stripes.
7.30.2004J.M. Henderson
Finding Home
Escape from Allentown
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Sometimes, part of finding a home is discovering what home isn't.
7.29.2004Jamie Beckman
Finding Home
Wanderer
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Ah, I admit, I occasionally jones for college and coffee shops and those inane yet inspiring conversations where we "discover" the well-trod trials of human experience. I enjoy the pseudo intellectual blur.
7.28.2004Leigh Householder
Finding Home
The Swing Set
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I should be elated. I should have a smile on my face in the rearview mirror of every car and truck that shoot past me. Yet, as much as I love being a mother, there is a wave of despondency that knocks me over every time I walk along these sidewalks.
7.26.2004Krystie Mayers
Finding Home
Home Is Where the Crack Hostel Is
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Constant moving was also an interesting sociological experiment. The more I moved, the more I got to observe other people and learn about them. I lived with people who had inhaled too many paint fumes, ex-military officers who demanded that the rent be paid in cash, the developmentally disabled, angry women who threw dishes on the sidewalk when upset, vegans who drove Volkswagen buses, depressed college students who were obsessed with video games, and adults who brought hitchhikers home to sleep on the couch.
7.24.2004Diana Wurn
Finding Home
Not in Kansas Anymore
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I'm so glad I got pulled out of my comfort zone long enough to discover that I didn't really know it at all. I'll always run off to New York or San Francisco when home isn't quite satisfying. But sometimes home is as new as anywhere else, especially if you experience someone else's version of it.
7.23.2004Cara Hall
Finding Home
Homeless in the Heartland
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Some people get to have things like homes, we learn, because they make the right kinds of decisions and some people don't because they make the wrong kinds.
7.21.2004Michael Tiboris
Finding Home
Foundations of Home
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Home has multiple definitions for me today, and now in the wisdom of my years, I resist the human instinct to come up with one all encompassing definition to sufficiently order my chaos.
7.19.2004Sheri McCord
Finding Home
Choosing the Vampire
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I pictured my old school girlfriends and I wasting the days away at wineries off country roads, linking arms on long walks around our city like we did as teens, and sharing everything once again: coffee, clothes, karma. Almost all my childhood chicas were still in St. Louis. Perhaps I glamorized, but I wanted it back.
7.17.2004Jamie Schmidt
Finding Home
Romancing the Town
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I suppose I've always thought of small-town life as a sort of liberation from chaos. I'm well aware of the oft-cited reputation of the small town, familiar with the various aliases: hick town, podunk, backwoods country, all terms to denote and degrade these diminutive dwelling grounds. These titles are limiting and express the ignorance of those who declare them -- the inevitable result when stereotypes are given credibility.
7.16.2004Kristen Elde
Finding Home
I Left
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One of my fondest memories during my brief tenure as a New York City bartender were the South Carolina Wachovia belles who were freebasing strawberry daiquiris and mudslides. They informed me that they really admire what some of us girls have to do to make a living here in New York. I told them they should admire what some of us have to do to get out.
7.14.2004Jennifer Cross
Finding Home
Going Home
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I was bemoaning my lack of "normalness" to a friend, and he reminded me that it's a mixed blessing that I'm home with my parents. "Don't you realize you're accumulating more memories of your parents than other people your age," he asked, rendering me unable to bitch anymore about movie nights with the folks.
7.9.2004Mary Gustafson
Finding Home
No Place Like Home
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We hadn't planned it this way. It seems a cruel twist of fate for the music to have stopped with us so far away from our loved ones; if we'd known the move would be permanent, would we have done it anyway? Impossible to say.
7.7.2004J. Daniel Janzen
Finding Home
An Open Letter to Angry Native Montanans
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Before long, though, I hated them, despite their beauty, for what they can do to well-balanced and all too rare native ecosystems. But while I learned to love this place and this place began to accept parts of me, I began to feel a bit of sympathy for anything exotic -- anything that, like me, didn’t quite belong.
6.30.2004Hank Green
Finding Home
Turning Around
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I was jealous of people who still had access to that singularly important piece of self-definition: the houses in which they were born. "I'm going home," people would say in passing, and what they meant was they were returning to the points from which they started, arriving full circle, going back to the only linoleum kitchen floors, creaky third steps, overgrown backyards and cramped bedrooms -- even if they've since been turned into studies or dens -- they’ve ever known.
6.25.2004Giordana Segneri
Finding Home
A Commune on Fire
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That fall I chained myself to the Internet in a desperate search for a way out. Winter survival training camps in California, sessions with "tracker" Tom Brown in Florida, esoteric New Paradigm spirituality, the Hopi Indians, Christian evangelism: anything was worth a shot.
6.23.2004Paul Salamone
Finding Home
Californicated
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That awareness can't be achieved while living in the Mecca of sameness, for there is nothing to gaze at. Southern California's got lots of yoga, but no juice. We experience incompleteness living in this place. It feels like we are successfully making our way through life, while simultaneously being unsettled. We are living without Home.
6.21.2004Dan Weaver
Finding Home
