DK_Photos
UNOAKED
A HOME
in RALEIGH
H
HOME. IT’S A BROAD CONCEPT with a myriad OF meanings. Homer touched on it a bit with his boy Odysseus and his travels after Troy’s fall; Faulkner obsessed over home and its rootedness in the past; and I’m pretty sure Bruce Springsteen would just be a dude singing in a New Jersey Applebee’s without his beloved hometown ballads. I think the overall definition of home is fluid and personal, but Frost summed it up pretty nicely when he said, “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.” If this sounds analogous to a Best Western motel,
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by MIMI MONTGOMERY you’re not incorrect – sometimes home isn’t the best option, but it does tend to serve a continental breakfast. Allow me to reference the lyricism of another laureate, the rapper DMX, when I say home can also be the place where one feels, “Y’all gonna make me lose my mind, up in here, up in here.” I’m almost positive this line is an allusion to visiting his childhood home and hiding in the bathroom, organizing decades-old travel-sized shampoo bottles to avoid conversation and preserve sanity. That or the ritualistic showcasing of one’s masculinity in the face of peer aggression. Either one. Admittedly, I’ve only been on this earth a short 25 years, but I’ve already called a few places home. I was born in
Duke Hospital, in the same room my brother would be born in two-and-a-half years later. I then called Purnell, Raleigh, Gastonia, Charlottesville, Va., and Washington, D.C, home, and then Raleigh again. I’m now settling into my most recent home-again: D.C. And as I look ahead, and look back, the idea of home is a common subject of contemplation in my life, right behind my most-considered existential question: At what time will my next meal be? When my parents took me home from the hospital, even my freshly developed brain could tell my house wasn’t like the other newborns’. Instead of an elegant neighborhood or charming historic home, they brought me back to the trout farm my father managed in Purnell. He had quit practicing law to be amongst the
