Where Home Really Is
Publisher's Note
Our Home series continues with an essay by Nancy Marmolejo, SVL Executive Cultura Ambassador. It moves through a crossed-out address book, a grandmother's rosary and stolen sip of margarita, and a year spent as her mother's caregiver, arriving at a definition of home that has nothing to do with walls at all.
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Before email, laptops, and smartphones, people wrote your contact information into an address book. Divided up in alphabetical order, you'd thumb through until you found the person you needed to call or send a card to. We all had one, filled with pages and pages of addresses and phone numbers. There were no backups except for maybe the list of emergency contacts taped on the wall next to the phone.
I was the person whose address got crossed out and updated so many times that an extra piece of note paper had to be slipped into the pages to list my current whereabouts. Being a young adult in 1980s San Francisco, it wasn't uncommon to move a few times a year for any host of reasons: lower rent, better landlord, new roommates, nightlife, safety, public transportation, parking if you had a car. To my family across the bridge not living the bohemian life, I drove them crazy. Crossed out address after crossed out address, new phone number after new phone number. It took commitment to stay connected.
I knew how to make any space mine by bringing in my plants, my favorite art, the cool chest I found on the street and painted. These were places I stayed but always knew were temporary. Home was something completely different.
The One Constant
The home I grew up in stayed the one constant in my 20-something nomadic life. It was the place I could always return to and be welcomed. There was always food for at least eight people (even when it was just my two parents living there), the latest family gossip, updates on my mom's garden, and tales of sinister squirrels who stripped the fruit trees bare.
My childhood home remained that one stable place, no matter how often I packed up and moved from apartment to apartment. It was a home where anyone in our family, sometimes even non-family, could find shelter and respite during hard times, transitions, breakups, divorces, all of it. No questions asked, just remember to pick up your plate from the table and put it in the sink.
The best memories were when my grandmother came to live there when she was 95. She'd shuffle through the house, rosary beads in hand, happily being served by my mom while simultaneously commenting in Spanish on her every move. My dad would slip a margarita over to settle her down, her eyes delighted by the scandal of it all. My grandmother was never a drinker but after two sips she'd start telling you about being crowned La Reina de las Fiestas Patrias as a teen, and how many suitors vied for her hand in marriage. Her face, mapped by wrinkles, her eyes fading, still held the joy of the youthful woman she'd been so long ago in Mexico.
Years later, my father passed away, and suddenly my mom was living alone. And yet, she was still the woman with the house full of food, ready for anyone who stopped by, a spare room available if needed. With six kids and ten grandkids, there was no lack of traffic coming and going from the house. You'd get fed for sure, but you'd also get asked to carry a box, figure out the remote, or celebrate whatever was blooming in her garden.
As time went on, my mother was diagnosed with stage 4 colorectal cancer. My life circumstances put me in yet another need to move, so I came home, this time with my ten-year-old daughter. Having watched my mom provide a home and hospitality to so many, it was now my turn to be the keeper of the home and to be her caregiver.
We spent a remarkable year together. I took her to chemo, drove her wherever she wanted to go, watched classic movies with her, looked at old photos, and entertained the steady stream of family stopping by to visit. At the end, I took care of her every need, from physically carrying her frail body into bed, to administering morphine. It remains the most sacred and memorable year of my life.
After my mom passed, my siblings and I made the decision to sell the house. It was a strange feeling giving up the place where so many memories were made, so many parties held, so many people housed. Our realtor advised us to update everything because, in his words, "it was stuck in a time warp." Yes, it was. Wood paneled walls, ancient linoleum floors, unfashionable carpets, and less than modern window coverings covered every surface. By the time the painters came, and the stager made the rooms into unrecognizable vignettes, the house no longer felt like the home where I grew up. It was a structure that housed our family for almost five decades, but now it was going to be a structure for someone else's next five decades.
It was at that moment that I realized home is not a house, not a floor plan, not a yard with sinister squirrels and flowers blooming. Home, for me, was the feeling of being welcomed in no matter how life's circumstances were. It was a safe haven, a respite from the harshness of the world. It was acceptance, comfort, a hug.
For me, home is familia. It is where people love you no matter what, and where there is always a place set for you at the table.
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Sergio Domeyko
Publisher
Co-Founder, COO & Publisher of Silicon Valley Latino, covering Latino business and culture across the Bay Area and beyond since 2011.