Terry Marotta: What is ‘home'?

<font size="2">Descending south from the tip of Manhattan along FDR drive, I spotted this sign spray-painted on a piece of cardboard and tacked to some barbed wire next to two of the many bridges that span that roadway.</font>

"October 6, 2007: Going Home to Greenville SC!" it said. "Good air. Good water. Good people!"

As much touched by the implied longing in this sign as I was by its exuberant proclamation of intent, I began wondering how people might answer if you asked them what came to mind when they heard the word "home."

Because how many, carried by the tides of Fate or History, find themselves in foreign parts when those waves recede? How many, just in our own country, are still not home a full two years after Katrina? Their houses stand rotting and stinking still, and still their owners are far from them.

What is home to a person anyway?

Some say it's the scent of the vegetation surrounding your abode, some the cherished belongings inside it. I've even heard people say that their truest home and all they yearn for at day's or journey's end is their bed and the familiar bedding spread upon it.

My third and final child is a son whose sparkle lit up all our lives for the time he lived with us. He went to college just five miles away, but once he graduated in '06, he moved to Spanish Harlem, where he now shares a tiny apartment perched above a dry-cleaning establishment.

It was his place I was driving to the day I saw this sign and I wondered: Would he now name the little flat "home"?

I felt my heart squeeze when I looked into his room there and saw the old comforter neatly across his bed.

It was a fixture in our lives, something used by all our children when they were small - to make forts with and have tea parties on, sure, but especially to keep folded under our bed, for those nights when any one of them might creep into our room, trailing a favored blanky, feeling sick or frightened or just wishing to be near us. They'd make a little nest of it, and in no time at all be happily sleeping inside it.

I'd forgotten I had given this comforter to our boy Michael, and I had to ask myself if I he knew that it was pieced together by his father's uncle's mother, born in the early 1890s.

She stitched it together it for the cold North American nights when her children's breath made fine splinters of ice on the walls of their small shared bedroom.

My uncle-by-marriage tells me he can still see her distributing the thick handfuls of wool around on the fabric.

Here in his ninth decade, he says he can at last see his mother whole: as a teenage girl whose first three babies died a-borning in Asia Minor; as an immigrant whose aunts and uncles perished in the Armenian genocide; as a bone-weary woman kneeling on the floor to create this simple quilt in a two-story flat whose only heat source was one coal stove in the kitchen and another in the small front room.

I hope the person who lettered that joyful sign is back now in Greenville, South Carolina.

I wish him warmth, and a sense of safety and belonging, too.

As the days grow short and the winter hurries in, I wish that for us all.

Terry, who still has the simple wooden trunk her great-grandfather arrived with when he fled the great Irish Famine in the 1850s, can be reached both at PO Box 270 Winchester, MA 01890 and tmarotta@comcast.net.