How We Home by nellclancy

How We Home. More specifically, how I home.

HOW WE HOME.

19 The summer of 1968 was one of acclamation to American Culture for the Sheridans of Dublin Ireland.

The Summer of 1968 was one of cocktail parties on cape cod, naked tennis, canned ham and fourth of July celebrations for the Underwoods of massachusetts.

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“Underwood are thin lipp stee ly eyed a sentuous”

In order to understand me, at all, you must understand my, home. It can be distilled into 26 pages for you today, but my story, my identity, and my future and past homes, interests, and curiosities I have yet to define. I am 20 years old and today I live in Boston Massachusetts. I have not always lived here. In Fact I have never lived here. Humans have an innate ability to adapt and create the community around us. This past summer I spent 4 months in Chatham and I had never felt more at home. I recently decided to move to Boston to attend BU and in the era we live in- I was concerned about my ability to meet people and make friends. The moral of the story is that my definition of home is not yet written. I know from my parents it is adaptable and ever changing. And I know where I came from has a big influence on my life. The next pages of this publication will briefly explore my families history of home, and our current battle with home in california.

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ome early member of the Underwood family came over on one of the next boats after the Mayflower and settled in the Boston area. The William Underwood Company was founded in 1822 and is best known for its Underwood Deviled Ham, a canned meat spread with deviled-egg like spices. William Underwood (17871864).William Underwood was your great, great, great, great grandfather. Underwood’s canned foods were sold to Union troops during the American Civil War of 1861–65 and the canned products soon included seafood products, such as lobster, oyster, and mackerel. William Underwood died in 1864, and his grandsons went on to lead the company. Underwood acquired B&M baked beans in 1965. The devil logo was trademarked in 1870 and the company claims in its own literature that it is the oldest food trademark still in use in the United States. The red devil that debuted in 1895 and started as a demonic figure evolved into a much friendlier version when compared to the original. Underwood, which up to this point had been privately owned by the Underwood family, was sold to Pet, Inc., in 1982. Loring Underwood, one of the great grandsons, bought the property in Chatham in 1900 and finished building the house there in 1913. It was their weekend house from the regular home in Boston.

orning Underwood purchased Three grassy properties in Chatham on the Mill Pond. The properties were given the the three Underwood daughters who married and became, Lorna Carey, Esther Johnson, Nina McGalpin. Lorna (underwood) Carey is my great grandmother. While the other sisters married Rockefellors and Johnsons (of Johnson and Johnson) my family’s property on the Mill Pond became an entertaining group of family and friends, constantly cycling though

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always Chatham

sherid blaCK ROCk dublin to Yougnstown, Ohio

dans ANNE

FINBAR PHILIP

FINBAR

LAURA CONOR

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oving from Dublin Ireland in 1968 to Youngstown Ohio made me confused about my identity. I was Irish but I only realized that because being from somewhere “else” was alienating in a mid-size Ohio city. I actually felt a strong Irish identity in my youth as a result of being perceived as an outsider. It took me a long while to feel comfortable and confident in America, something my older brother never really did. My younger siblings didn’t have to consider this and I suppose they were lucky. Ultimately, I learned how to adapt and thrive, but this initial outsider status probably contributed to me being a late bloomer in life. Finbar (Barry) Sheridan

Why Ohi0?

hy Ohio? Why Youngstown? It has always been unclear to me how my father’s family ended up in an old steel town, in the middle of the country and why they chose to put roots down in a place they grew to dread. I note, that is an easy thing to question as I spend most of my *privileged* life bicoastally in the US. My father’s parents first moved to Syracuse, New York, where his house on Lancaster Street burned down after a month of living in it due to a nanny putting embers from a fire in what he recalls as a “paper bag” that set the house to blaze in the middle of the night. Immediately following this dramatic event his family re-evaluated. With no house and his father, already sick of University life working at Syracuse, Finbar Sr sought a new opportunity. An opening at Southside Hospital in Youngstown Ohio, running the Radiation Oncology Department to be exact. My father Finbar Jr. recalls, “To someone sitting in 2021 you may wonder, who could choose such a shitty place? But at the time it was like a thriving east coast city with a strong working class. It had two symphony orchestras, parks, and a Strouse downtown!” What youngstown experienced was an economic bust in the 70s. Japanese steel became very competitive with US steel, the town lost jobs and Youngstown became irrelevant. It was the start of the 50 year decline in manufacturing, decline in unions, decline in relative and wealthy working class incomes. Both my parents would say, both of them do not have a Home Town, they like to say “We live in the present not the past.”

From the age of 5-21 my father lived in Youngstown before attending a boarding school in Connecticut. While he was there his family moved to Western Massachusetts and Finbar Jr never stepped foot in Youngstown again. “My parents would feel very strong about Dublin. They met there, got married there, had a life there. I feel no loyalty to Ohio. I would actually say I now feel the most connected to New York where I moved after College. You have to find a place where you connect culturally, something I think is true for everyone. It was by far the most exciting, diverse, and worldly place I had lived yet. But in fact I had just gone to New York Because there were 15 million people and a pretty good chance of finding a job. Flash forward to when Lorna and I moved with Nina and Quinn to Miami in 1999 I was ecstatic. I had yet to find a place with similar energy as New York and couldn’t believe people really got to live there!” My dad’s career took the family to Connecticut and then lastly to California. Sonoma was another place where they connected to very quickly. “It was a place you could say proudly I’m from Sonoma even if you just moved there”

Dublin, Ireland Young stown, OH Ringoes, NJ Princ eton, NJ New York, NY Austin, TX Coral Gable s, FL Weston, CT Sonoma, CA

How do the people who surround you home? become

To what extent should anyone about care your history.

How choose

we home?

What are the factors that contribute to a sense of place? What happens when home is no longer safe?

Do get

How much does home affect your identity?

we to

really choose

ever home?

How will you choose your home?

T0 what extent sh0uld any0ne care ab0ut y0ur hist0ry? My Grandfather John Mack died before I was 6. I like to think we would have been the best of friends. He was smart, witty and the love of my Grandmother’s (Lorna Mack) life. He had a beautiful life with tremendous stories including enlisting for WW2 when he was 17. He married Lorna Mack after a one-night-stand after meeting her on her family dock in Chatham, Massachusetts. That meet-cute involved sail boats and tennis and led to 2 more daughters Carey Mack, and Lorna (Mack) Sheridan, my mother. He died unexpectedly in Heathrow airport of a sudden massive stroke. The study of home is an example of how people can assimilate, how people get along successfully in some cases like my fathers. In others homes lie within. Home cannot be confined to 4 walls and a ceiling. Home does not always mean abundant safety, but a feeling. And that was what John Mack was to so many people, a home. He represented all aspects of home that people seek. To this day the lives he touched have inspired friendships and families to stay incontact, specifically those in the Chatham Community.

People can be home and so can a place. Either way all “home” represents is a part of your identity and personality you may not be able to vocalize or name. Your home, your safe place or person, all say similar things about your history and your future.

H0w d

y0u b

d0 the pe0ple ar0und bec0me y0ur h0me?

What happens h0me is n0 l0n safe? Before October of 2017, I thought that the most important part of home to me was a feeling of safety. It didn’t take long to realize that my sense of home was about to become a grey area when I woke up at 3am on October 8th with flames out my window. After weeks of being evacuated from the raging wildfires that struck my home town in Northern California I had to come to terms with a different definition of home. When we were finally allowed back to school after 3 weeks of “smoke break” and trauma recovery students were crying and sharing stories from their own personal home destructions. I felt guilt as I knew I would be able to return to my physical home (or rather my physical 4 walls). But a student named Ella Coughey who lost everything said that she counts herself as one of the “lucky ones” because she still had her family and community. This is their story of home and loss.

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hen Todd and Mary Caughey moved into their Kenwood home 22 years ago, they planted half a dozen coastal redwood trees on their 1-acre property, a reflection that they were ready to put down roots and raise their family. Their son and daughter are now in high school. But their home was lost to the fires that burned through Sonoma Valley and Bennett Valley in October, destroying 652 homes in Kenwood, Glen Ellen and other parts of the two valleys. The loss for the Caugheys included those prized redwoods, which remained standing but sustained enough damage to raise concern that they would topple. So the couple hired a woodworker to mill lumber from the trees, cutting them into 4-inch thick boards - shiny planks that are a first step toward the new home the family intends to build on the property. That dream is likely two to three years away, said Mary Caughey, 49. “It’s unreal. You never in a million years guess you would be doing this at this age, especially while raising teenagers,” she said. Little goes smoothly. First, as with all other fire survivors contemplating rebuilding, the debris cleanup needed to happen. In Bennett and Sonoma valleys, including Kenwood and Glen Ellen, all but about two dozen of the properties signed up for government cleanup

remained to be cleared, according to the Army Corps of Engineers, which is overseeing the largest number of projects in the region. For the Caugheys, that step came on Jan. 2. Mary was upbeat about watching it all disappear, but her concern grew when the excavator kept digging. “They scraped super-deep,” she said. “It’s like a swimming pool.” Mary was told by the Environmental Protection Agency that the standard for removal is 6- to 12-inches down and that’s what happened on the surrounding 23 burned homesites in their neighborhood. The Caugheys’ lot was dug much deeper, in some places as deep as 4 feet. A locally based subcontractor for AshBritt Environmental, which is handling debris removal for the Army Corps, did the cleanup. Caughey believes they removed too much dirt, and the couple worry about increased building costs because the ground will need to be made level with engineered fill and compacted.“We don’t know if insurance will cover this,” Mary Caughey said. The couple were insured, but like many homeowners affected by the fires they are worried their policy won’t cover the full cost of rebuilding. “I don’t know exactly what this is all going to cost, but I know the insurance is not going to be enough

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to get us back to what we had,” Mary Caughey said.In addition to the fourbedroom ranch-style house, there was a small barn where they kept chickens, Mary’s honeybee hives, Todd’s cabernet sauvignon vineyard and the landscaping - the redwoods, walnut, olive and fruit trees. Some of the vines survived, and a rose bush that burned to the ground is showing a few shoots. Mustard weed and daffodils have bloomed. Some of her beekeeping equipment made it through, but looters stole it. Mary Caughey, a business office manager at Rincon Valley School, remains upbeat, waving her arm in the direction of Sugarloaf Mountain to the east and laughing. The trees that used to block their parts of their vista of the Mayacamas Mountains are gone. “At least the view is better now,” she said.

n exerpt r0m the Press emOcrat 2017

This publication was designed and printed in Boston, Massachusetts. By Nell Sheridan February 2021.

Typefaces: BD Geminis, Birra, Synthemesic, Bulletin Script

T0 th0se wh0 feel asth0ugh they are with 0ut H0me.

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