``Home’’ is a word loaded with meaning, different for each person. Some have always known where home is. Others never know. A third group, they know but want to forget.
For most of my life, I was caught somewhere in between all of those.
Growing up, our family lived in six different houses in four states as my father worked his way up the corporate ladder. Every two school years I was the new kid. With a name like Moroney, you can guess how many times I was told to stick a feather in my hat and call it macaroni!
The taunting at each new stop hardened the kid in me against the cruel vagaries of a wide world, not unlike that boy named Sue.
But all that moving never anchored me. A college roommate, born and raised in Worcester, took me home once for Sunday dinner. I met some of his neighborhood friends. They spoke to each other in shorthand. They traded secrets. They had history.
I craved that continuity.
These last couple of years after my retirement, I’ve spent most of the summer in Dennis Port, where my idea of home has taken on greater clarity, solidifying something that had always been there, but never so evident. Jumping from state to state as a boy, the one constant was a week or two each year here on Cape Cod. That was my continuity. I fell in love early on.
-First there was that rented cottage with the screened-in porch hard by Long Pond in Harwich. That summer my brothers and I swam in the ocean in the morning and headed for the pond after lunch.
-Later, the rooming house on Montgomery Avenue in Falmouth Heights when I was just out of college, night manager and short-order cook at Howard Johnson’s. It was the first summer I ran the Falmouth Road Race.
-Then the old Victorian, another family rental, rooms as small as the people who built them. It still stands, vacant now, at the end of the parking lot in downtown Harwich Port, reminding me of quiet nights on that porch with a cold beer balanced on the railing.
-Later still, my parents’ chalet-style cottage among tall pines with a homemade bocce court on a cul-de-sac in Dennis Port. There, extended family gathered every Labor Day, and my sons first took up pail and shovel.
-And now, my own cottage in that same town in a tightknit community by the sea.
These summer chapters write the story of my Cape Cod, a place I have come to see as my true north, my home.
Even now, when I come up over the hill on Old Wharf Road and I see the ocean glittering as it tops the cottages and clotheslines, my stomach rumbles with renewed excitement.
Home, after all, is not a number attached to a street. It’s not a coordinate on Google Maps. It is a place in the deepest part of us where we store the memories that demand to be played over and over.
Odysseus, as Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster reminds us, took 20 years from the day he left to get back to his home. It took me a might longer to figure out my Ithaca.
These days, as summer collapses into the serenity of fall, I walk to the water for a swim or to look at the stars, and silently – so as not to appear completely nuts -- I say hello to the beach, the birds and the waves.
And they say welcome home.
