“Home is where the heart is.” It is a saying we’ve all heard, a metaphor expressing one’s deep desires and longings to be either in a place or with a loved one, wherever that loved one may be. It is a statement of being cocooned in comfort, wrapped in warmth, sheltered in safety, and cushioned in care. It symbolizes a place of protection and a wellspring of well-being. It alludes to a point of peace deep within. It speaks to a soul-deep satisfaction of being in the right place at the right time where all is harmonious and all is happy.
Heart Songs are written about that right place. “I Left My Heart In San Francisco,” “Dear Hearts and Gentle People (Who Live In My Home Town),” and “The Gang That Sang Heart of My Heart (On the Corner of the Street).” That place is a place of “rightness,” of “accordance,” and of “companionship.” It is a place of roots, of foundation, of bedrock, and of footing. That place is a touchstone by which all other places are measured.
It is common for people to speak of “back home” while having resided for years in a city other than their birth city. Perhaps they will say something like, “Every summer we go back home to visit,” or “Back home we have dynamic thunderstorms, too.” Maybe they will say, “These sunrises here are almost as pretty as the ones back home.” Back home. Where the heart is.
For a long time I could not understand why people who had lived decades in places far removed from their birth continued to refer to “back home.” After all, are not the state, the county, the city, and the structure in which one lives one’s home? I could not understand why someone who was born, say, in Mobile but had lived for years in Minneapolis referred to Mobile as “back home” instead of “birth city.” Or vice versa. As I age, I can better grasp that longing for a return to the roots from which one grew and from the soil from which one sprang.
However, over the years I have “put down roots” in several places that I have loved. I “pulled up roots” but left parts of my heart in those places: Knoxville and Nashville, Charlotte, Denver, Port Townsend and Seattle, Fort Myers and Melbourne, Florida. I loved them all. Now my roots have been planted in Mesa, Arizona. My heart encompasses all of the Phoenix metroplex of which Mesa is a part. My roots have taken hold in the hard Sonoran Desert caliche. My heart thrills to be part of a vibrant, energetic urban community that is emerging as one of America’s great metropolises.
Yet when I hear a mockingbird’s song, I am pulled back to another time and place when one sang through a sultry night while perched in a magnificent oak resplendently draped in Spanish moss under a full moon in central Florida. When I smell the fragrance of Arizona orange blossoms, I am transported back to an orange blossom bouquet permeating the very breaths of my childhood. When a cold Phoenix winter’s day chills my bones, I stand shivering again on the Christmas-decorated main street of the small Florida town in which I was born, Lake Wales. Back home. Where the heart is.
We all have those places where our hearts are. It seems those majestic tendrils of gray Spanish moss encircled my young one long ago. They still do. Their wispy ringlets still speak to my soul of a special place from which this lifetime began. (“This” lifetime? A nod to reincarnation, perhaps? Ah, but that’s another article for another time.) Other hearts may still hear the call of windswept prairies, rugged mountains, lush treescapes, or bustling cities. Those are special calls from special places where special lives began and where special parts of hearts still are.
Once I wrote a song whose lyrics began “Home is where the heart is. There’s a home in my heart.” The rest of those lyrics have long faded, and, unfortunately, that song was never recorded. The paper on which it was written has long been lost. However, the truth of those lyrics remains. There are places and persons deeply significant to each of us which we tenderly hold dear and which we lovingly call home.
Home. Where the heart is.
Those are my thoughts today.
Currently Noah and his wife Vashti live in Mesa, Arizona, where they continue to write their “Happily Ever After Story.” Noah also loves Marketing. He presently serves as Marketing Liaison for three local UPS stores.