Hiraeth

I was born in Boston. In a different life, I would have been a regular at The Garden, had the wicked accent of my first-grade native-Bostonian teacher, and grown up to live in Charlestown after Jennifer Coolidge spoke at my Emerson College graduation. Instead, when I was in third grade, I moved from Boston to Ohio. If someone asks where I’m from, I say Ohio, even though I spent 8 years in Boston, 10 years in Ohio, 5 years in Western PA, and 23 years in Colorado.  

I grew up in the same house as my mother, in the bedroom she shared with my aunt. I attended middle school in the school building from which my grandfather graduated from high school. His photo, sepia oval portraits by class, was in the first floor hall by the cafeteria. I graduated from the same high school my mother did, exactly thirty years later. So, while I lived in Ohio just barely “the most” of my pre-adulthood, I was tied to it by blood and by land and by people who knew me through generations of my family. That’s a strong tie, and for me, it was a positive and significant, even if I wasn’t often back after high school. 

The house I grew up in was built in 1898, which we knew based on the handwritten date on the basement wall. My grandfather was a dairy farmer, who I know mostly from photos, but I love the photos. Unfortunately, he died in a farming accident before I truly knew him well, but I grew up with my grandmother. She was a farmer’s wife, and a township clerk, a youth group leader, a gardener, a baker, a bookkeeper, a secret keeper. She was a fierce advocate against injustice, and the caretaker of our home. She hand-polished the hardwood floors with Murphy’s Oil Soap, hung wallpaper in all its rooms, kept its plants flowering, and made us fluffy, perfectly browned “Grandpa’s pancakes” for breakfast, long after he was gone. 

Sometimes, when you are very lucky and very privileged, you don’t realize that what you have might not always be yours to skip back to when you choose. The safety seems like a given. The warmth palpable. And that was the case for me, with my childhood home. It was more than a house; it was a deep connection to who I was.  

When my grandmother died, despite her being integral to my perception of home and self, I didn’t go to her funeral, which you may imagine I have come to regret, but I don’t. My grandmother was one of the very most substantial people I have ever known, and I only wanted memories of her alive. It’s selfish, probably, and I may have disappointed some people, too, but I’m glad I can’t remember anything else. After a few years, the house and farm I grew up in were sold at auction, which everyone knew was coming and it was just the way of things. In a different life, maybe one of us would have been a farmer. Or developed a patent for post-its that would have bought and sold the house within the family a dozen times over. But we are a family of teachers and artists and everyday offices. It was a surprise, however – and maybe it shouldn’t have been – when the new owner decided to tear down the house to make more room for saleable crops. To be fair, I suppose, he hadn’t rolled coffee can ice cream on the front porch in the summer or played baseball between the trees of the backyard. He hadn’t picked strawberries and green beans, or hidden secrets in the wonky broken step going up to the attic. He didn’t know that every drafty window and polished floorboard was a living thing.  

After the house went, my parents bought a new house a mile away, which I visit less than I should. To visit is to acknowledge what was is no longer there. That is a hard thing to realize, when you’ve been gone for so long that you no longer have the instinct of a native, but you also aren’t ready to be a stranger. A month ago, we went back for a visit. It was the first time my husband had been to my hometown, despite various other family trips and vacations and memories. The first time we drove by what was the house, I couldn’t find it. I had no idea where in that field of corn it should have been, which was upsetting. Corn is a tough season for finding memories. We got to “the Habitat Houses” (houses that my grandmother had donated land for decades ago and probably aren’t even owned by the same people anymore), and I said that, by matter of deduction, the house would have been… back there. Later that day, following my mom and dad, my dad put his turn signal on as an indicator. There. We lived there. We loved there. And laughed there. We played Dutch Blitz and euchre and bought Christmas trees that always looked more like fat, happy bushes. We lived there – just here – to the left.  

Since the first time I heard it, the word hiraeth has felt a bit like a glow of recognition in a dark room. Hiraeth is a Welsh word for a deep, nostalgic longing for a place, time, or person that is gone, a bittersweet feeling of missing something irretrievably lost. It is homesickness, nostalgia, and yearning blended into a profound, sometimes painful, sense of connection to something that is not just absent, but out of reach.  

We all get nostalgic from time to time about things we remember fondly, things we may not even miss, per se, but feel a warm sense of memory around. Some college days, when my friends were many, the world was large, and the future was boundless. Those were some good, glowy days, but they were also of an era, a door to open other doors. To go back would be to meet a me of lesser layers, to give up experiences I have damn well earned, but I love the memories. Honestly, I would never go back to the days when my children were very young (love those babies, but every new stage is the stage I love the most). There are times when I see a photo or a video, and all I want is to be able to feel the light but complete and perfect weight of tiny little bodies lying on my chest as we dozed at midnight, with tiny Flintstone feet with no arches and sticky hands and the wonder of sprinklers and teeth-staining blue frosted birthday cakes. I miss the idea of it sometimes, but the memories are enough. I wouldn’t go back.  

It has occurred to me recently that the only other thing besides my childhood home that brings me to the word – to the embodiment of – hiraeth, is today’s United States. I feel like I’m driving by, and I just can’t even point out where it used to be. It’s so changed that I can’t recognize it. The loss is a visceral hurt. 

I don’t think that my core belief system is particularly complicated, and it’s been based largely in the humanitarian brand of Christianity in which I was raised. I was brought up to be sympathetic and compassionate, which didn’t seem to be particularly crazy liberal jargon. When I was in my late 20s, I was working at Dex (which was a phone book company, for those who remember those). One of the salespeople – Chip – was nearing retirement age and had had a colorful life of good luck and affluence in southern Florida, where we had a stable yellow book market (at the time, being a yellow pages salesman was basically like peddling water in the desert. Everyone needed what he was selling). He told me, at one point after some conversation or another (we were amicably close for people 35 years and 2000 miles apart), that I only thought I was a liberal because I hadn’t made any real money yet. I think about Chip sometimes. And while I don’t know if I’ve achieved Chip’s “real money,” I appreciate that money isn’t currently what keeps me up at night. Landing here has been hard work, and luck, and probably capitalizing on luck with hard work. I know at this point that things can fall apart as easily as they can fall together and I’m probably a little more cynical than I was when Chip knew me. But when I think about him, it’s because I want to tell him he was wrong. Being politically liberal wasn’t a passing phase based on my monetary status. It’s my essential belief system.  

Recently, Eva had to write an essay for her senior year English class about her Core Value. As a soon-to-be-teacher, she wrote eloquently about making sure that everyone is given the tools and support to reach their potential. I think it’s a valuable assignment, and one that perhaps we missed assigning to ourselves. When I was Eva’s age, the world was a pretty stable place for a teenager. I didn’t spend an inordinate amount of time concerned about the state of the world, or the United States’ presence in it. I remember some political debate, but I wasn’t losing any sleep over it. I didn’t use a computer to read news. It was mostly for writing, or games. Dial-up kept things simple. I didn’t have a cell phone yet. Columbine hadn’t happened. When Eva talks about my childhood, she does so with a sense of hiraeth. It’s a golden age she can’t quite imagine, but she misses the idea of it.  

When I first started thinking about my core values, I had a list a mile long. I didn’t want to “miss” anything. I wanted to make sure my stated values were an advocate for all the things and people and places and ideas that do keep me up at night. But brevity is king. I think, for the sake of the former journalism major in me, the summary is this:  I believe in equity, empathy, and science.  

For me, when something is hugely upsetting, it is because it is at odds with one of those three values. Cancelling of billions in medical research funding and destroying millions in food and medicines already promised to, and packed for, underdeveloped countries sparks empathy outrage. DOGE upending people’s lives randomly and needlessly. Equity. Empathy. Science. Major cuts to FEMA and NOAA start with a science outrage but will be equity and empathy anger by the end of hurricane and fire season (both of which are much longer and more brutal than they used to be.) 

The farcical manipulation of immigration data and outright lies depicting migrants and asylum seekers as somehow monstrous, when data shows that immigrant communities commit fewer crimes and are safer, due to strong bonds within them, shared experience, and careful steps not to be deported. A traffic ticket for me is not the same as a traffic ticket for someone who is trying desperately to raise a family here while sending money to family in another country, as well. Rounding up violin players and soccer dad fathers get headlines, but the everyday cruelty of detaining people at the immigration hearings they are mandated to be at – what kind of choice is that? What scared but hopeful conversations must be happening at kitchen tables the night before, and heartache the day of. The gathering up of farm laborers and day workers and thousands of others who are working as hard and probably harder than anyone else in this country is against everything we stand for. Equity, empathy, and science.  

Have we, a nation built on stolen ground, lost our way? Or was this always our latent, inherent psychology? It’s worth remembering that Chicanos in the southwest did not move into the United States, crossing our border. The border moved over them, and treaties with the United States government fell and broke. Native Americans roamed the entirety of this country, before we showed up uninvited. How can we say, without hypocrisy, that our borders are somehow now sacred to us in this moment? Equity, empathy, science.  

I could go on for days, of course. I don’t have the depth and range to react to all of the travesties happening every day. Actions that would have made me irate for weeks are now just eight and ten on a daily list that I can only even digest the top three to five.  

This may shock no one, but I wasn’t a big fan of George W Bush. Both of his presidencies were marked with foreign wars and he ended with a financial crisis that took years to fix (although, it did let me buy my first house with crazy loose terms, to my benefit). But he was also a big advocate for education reform, was handed an impossible situation with 9/11, and at the end of the day, any friend of Michelle Obama’s has layers I would appreciate, I’m sure.  

I think Governor Mitt Romney was probably a politician who I would have appreciated more than presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who pivoted from centrist to conservative to lock the nomination. But he’s proven himself a principled and decent person who has put the country above currying political favor. McCain was a bit more war hawk than I would have preferred, but for reasons that I suppose are understandable. I disagreed with him on where he ended up on most of his platform, but again, I didn’t doubt his basic love for the United States, or that his run was an act of service as well as – as I’m sure in the case for every single politician – a pinnacle of personal achievement. I understand that my opinions are not everyone’s opinions. I believe that, while policies can shift, a strong nation can flex to accommodate people who, at the end of the day, want equity, empathy and science, but see it from different perspectives.  

At no point in the presidencies or the presidential races above did I ever think, “For the love of all that is true and just, our nation may never recover from this.” Until now.  

Militarized streets, universities held for ransom, shake-downs of private industry, attempts at nationalization of the press, concentration camps and meetings with war criminal dictators on US soil, FOX News as a US Cabinet. I still have hope that we will recover. Bruised and battered and having to fight our way back to respectability and decency, within ourselves and on the world stage. But coming back from this would be rebuilding the house, not saving what it was. The foundation is broken and now, instead of steady maintenance, we will have to start again with what we have – hopefully – learned.  

Hiraeth is the deep longing for something irretrievably lost. It’s why so many of us are openly grieving right now. Just like the plaster, slate, stained glass and polished wood of my childhood home, the country that I grew up in has fallen. The hope is that it is not so far gone that we are unable to even recognize it when we drive by.  

A republic, if you can keep it.