Finding home

It’s been said that home is where your heart is. If that is true, I have many homes, for I have left bits of my heart in the mountains of Colorado, with the stark landscape and ever-present sea of the west of Ireland, and in the familiar rooms and winding staircase of the dormered cape house that was my childhood home.

When I moved back to New England after nearly a decade of living other places, I figured I’d settle down in a largish town, with plenty of people and job opportunities and things to do. I ended up finding all the people, opportunities, and fun I needed right here in Franconia. I guess I’m just a small town girl.

So, I understood the other day when a friend, recently relocated to small town New Hampshire from big city New York, remarked on how much she loved life in her new community – and how surprised she was by her contentment at small town living. That conversation involved a couple of other recent big town transplants, who talked about how little they miss the mall – where you’re likely to spend too much time and too much money buying things you don’t need anyway – or the traffic, the keeping-up-with-the-Joneses, even the anonymity of living in a bigger place.

Many people, of course, thrive in big cities and love the world of lights and noise and museums and galleries and the myriad other conveniences and luxuries so easily accessible in metropolitan areas. One of the many beauties of New England, though, is that wherever you live, a journey of a mere few hours can bring you to the mountains or the ocean, a city or a small town, hustle and bustle or peace and quiet. It’s a little bit like having it all.

I have friends who have grown up here and never left, some who moved away and came back, and others who, like me, arrived from somewhere else. While I grew up skiing at Cannon Mountain, have lived here full time for a dozen years, and married a local boy, I have no illusion of being a true local. I’m a transplant from Massachusetts, and I’m OK with that.

A friend whose family has lived in the area for generations once told me, in some fit of frustration over an influx of “flatlanders” and their bothersome ways, “There are two kinds of people: those who are from here and those who are from someplace else.” When I pointed out that I fit into the latter category, he fell into a brief, flustered silence, then replied, “There are three kinds of people: those who are from here, those who are from someplace else, and those who came from someplace else, but we like ‘em anyway.”

For hundreds of years, people have been coming from “someplace else” to the White Mountains in search of home. They’ve come for the mountains and the relative solitude they offer, to seek adventure, for the fresh air and cool rivers and quiet fields and forests, for the love of another person, sometimes for jobs, often to find a simpler way of life – to build a way of living that matters.

For me, coming home to New England after years away meant returning to a familiar place and again being surrounded by family. I didn’t fully appreciate that latter bit until I had children of my own. Those children are growing up with aunts and uncles and grandparents literally right around the corner or just down the road. Whichever way we turn out of the driveway, we’re heading toward family.

Once I flew the coop of my own childhood home, it took having children to root me to any place so firmly again. I want my children to have a good sense of home, too, even if this is not home to them forever. And so I have set aside my wanderlusting ways and put down roots, anchoring me to this place, this home, even as my heart sometimes soars with my imagination to other places.

Home, now, is at our dining room table, the same table where I sat as a little girl with my parents and brothers – and where I sit now with my children, cats and dog underfoot, the room filled with the wonderfully unpredictable (and sometimes outrageously exasperating) conversation of children. Home is the backyard vegetable garden, hands stuck into dirt, sun or rain upon my back. Home is the mountains where I grew up skiing and hiking and which my children now explore. Home is in the embrace of those children, my husband, my parents, our family.

How lucky I am to be at home here, where my heart is.

Original content by Meghan McCarthy McPhaul and posted to her blog: Writings from a full life. This essay also appears as Meghan's CLOSE TO HOME column in the January 10, 2014 edition of the Littleton Record.

Friends and Resolutions

I am not much for making New Year’s resolutions. Never have been. I like to think that if I see a change that needs making, I try to make it regardless of the date on the calendar. That may or may not be true, but it’s what I like to think.

But having just sorted the Christmas cards into piles – recyclable, throw-away, and a very few that I will keep and find next year or the year after, tucked away in the Christmas tree ornaments or wrapping paper – I think I should resolve to make more of an effort to reconnect with old friends in the new year.

In an era when our mailboxes rarely contain more than bills and catalogs, the flurry of cards at the holidays is like a boon for the heart. Some are from people who live down the road, or down the Interstate, whom I see and speak with regularly. Many are from cousins and other relatives from all sides of the family. And some cards come from friends far away, bearing photos of faces from my past in their own versions of the present.

Whether I’m opening a crisp envelope addressed in familiar handwriting, or sending my own cards to faraway places, I remember these friends from different stages of my life and the times we shared. I spent a good few years in my 20s wanderlusting from New England and Upstate New York to Europe and Colorado and Ireland and, finally, back to New England. I’ve left a piece of my heart in most of the places I’ve lived, and carry with me the friendships and memories from each stop along the way.

So, while I love the life I’m in now, the sending and receiving of Christmas card greetings and photos makes me miss acutely the folks with whom I’ve shared some of my past. The now-California girl I spent a summer with hitchhiking around Ireland. The childhood buddy I dragged out to Colorado with me, who still lives there 15 years later. The friend I got to know and love on a spontaneous wilderness backpacking trip in Colorado. The former roommate who took me camping when my beat-up truck had a flat and I was desperate to sleep under the stars. The wonderfully fun women I played soccer with during my summer in Connemara. The friends I’ve worked with and skied with in various places. The high school pals who have grown along with me, becoming doctors, teachers, parents.

Some of them I think of only occasionally. Others I miss nearly every day.

It is easy in the busy-ness of raising kids, maintaining a career, and keeping a home to become content with an occasional brief email message, phone text, or Facebook post to keep in touch. But really those are sorry replacements for an actual conversation – whether over a coffee shop latte, a glass of wine, or on the phone.

Our friendships, whether new, old, or rediscovered, make life richer in so many ways. And so I hope to reconnect with some old friends in the year to come – and make the time to create great memories with friends old and new.

Here’s to a New Year prosperous in friends!