When I was small, my parents seemed to think that moving to a new city to give my dad better job opportunities was a pretty cool thing to do.

In retrospect, it was definitely the right thing to do; however, from a little-kid standpoint, entering a second-grade (or third-grade or fifth-grade) class in January or March was a lot like torture.

I was forever the new kid. I didn't know the in-crowd lingo; I didn't even know who the in-crowd was. My funky glasses and homemade clothes didn't help. And bringing friends home to my heavily accented parents and bizarre "un-American" food was just out of the question. I didn't eat a PB&J at home until I was in high school, and my mom managed some pretty strange hamburgers loaded with things like capers and eggs and who-knows-what spices, all thoroughly mixed by hand.

The kids who didn't pick on me tended to shun me. The ones who were friendly were among the others who were a little odd or too smart or too shy to fit in with the cool kids.

My mother, who grew up in Hitler's Austria, freaked out when I wanted to join a Brownie troop. No little brown uniform for her newly American daughter. She didn't tell me why I couldn't be a Brownie, and not understanding why, I tearfully watched from a distance while my classmates played in their little brown dresses and beanies.

At some point, I stopped trying to fit in. I remember playing alone a lot and finding things to do--like reading or climbing trees or singing or dancing--that didn't require an audience or playmates. Always shy, life was just easier on my own. Of course, the minute I stopped trying, people seemed more attracted to me. When, eventually, I did fit in, it was with the freaks.

My answers to "Where are you from?" became elaborate over time. I was born in Germany to Austrian parents, moved to Manhattan as an infant, to Brooklyn as a toddler and spent summers in the Catskills.

After my parents moved to the Washington, D.C., suburbs when I was about 7 or 8, we must have moved a half-dozen times until I graduated from high school, which added another half-dozen towns to my list.

I kept up the pattern once I was on my own. I even bragged at one point that I moved once a year whether I needed to or not. "It keeps things light," I'd say, because I never moved anything I hadn't used since last year's move. Truth is, not having a sense of what or where "home" was, the roofs over my head never had great importance to me, and in my younger, relatively stuff-free days, it was easy to just pack up the car and go.

These days, I know my experience isn't all that unusual. Plenty of Americans move over the course of their lives--37.5 million just last year, according the U.S. Census Bureau--and my experience pales to those of some Army brats I've met. People move for a variety of reasons, but most, one in four, do it for housing upgrades--bigger, better homes. People also move for family-related reasons, whether that's a change in status, such as marriage or divorce; additions to the family; and more and more, moving back home to care for aging parents.

Only 16.4 percent of movers did so for employment needs. Nearly 70 percent of movers stayed in the same county, while 11.5 percent moved to a different state. If you were 16 or older, poor, black and unemployed, you were more likely to move. Also, if you lived in the west or south, you moved more often than folks in other regions. Chances are high that you moved from a city into a suburb; suburbs had a net gain of 2.5 million last year.

So in an era where millions of us pack up our junk every year and find a new roof, what does "home" mean?

In Mississippi, where it seems nine out of 10 people I meet were born and raised within the borders of the state, home seems to be either where your football team is or where your mama (or grandma) lives, or both, regardless of where your actual roof is located. I've met people who retained life-long friendships with their first-grade classmates, having moved up the academic ladder together from kindergarten through college. I never dreamed such relationships were possible.

Going home is every bit as strong an American tradition as moving from home to attend school or find a job. Hollywood bets that people who travel home have lots of interesting stories to share. How else to explain the popularity of homecoming movies from "It's a Wonderful Life" to "Christmas Vacation" and "Home Alone." All you have to do is check out an airport the days before Thanksgiving to witness the many people keeping strong ties to the family homestead.

So is home where your family is?

At 41, I came to Mississippi for a better-paying job with greater career-advancement opportunities--sound familiar? Two years later, my dad retired (at 78, bless his heart), and my parents followed me to a warmer climate and a lower cost of living, and a year after that, I bought a house. It still didn't feel like home.

The older I get, the more I'm convinced that "home is where the heart is." Like all cliches, truth lies in the well-worn words. My heart may just be in a city I barely know: Vienna, Austria. My mom and dad were born there, as were my grandparents, and now they're all buried in the city. The one time I visited Vienna (that I can remember--I was there as an infant), it felt like home, from the historic castles and churches to the horse-drawn carriages to the trolleys and numerous parks and outdoor cafes.

My sisters and I picked a particularly virile-looking statue on the grounds of Schoen-brunn Palace to name as our ancestor purely on the basis of family lore. His wife, so the story goes, was appalled that a royal sculptor used her husband's nude figure as a model, forbidding him to ever reveal which sculpture was modeled on his athletic physique.

Maybe it's all just wishful thinking. Perhaps my faraway home just sounds a little more exotic than saying my home is in Mississippi, where my roof has been for going on 15 years now.

Ultimately, I believe home is where we decide our hearts are, for whatever reason. With both feet and a roof in the Magnolia State, maybe it's time for me to decide that I'll give her my heart and stick around for a while longer. There's a chance I've come home after all, even if I will never quite get football.

Previous Comments

ID

165432

Comment

What a great column on this subject! I think you should definitely stay here for good, Ronni. We need your wisdom, compassion, & intelligence! As for the football thing, what works for me is simply to ignore it when it doesn't suit my purposes, and enjoy it when I do feel inclined to. People around here just like having something bigger than themselves that they can identify with year after year. Keep up the good work! Sara Anderson

Author

Sara Anderson

Date

2011-11-18T22:04:27-06:00