Yesterday I took advantage of the gorgeous fall weather to walk up the hill and set loose some milkweed seeds collected by my old friend in North Carolina. We have two kinds of milkweed in the butterfly meadow already but none like these, producing red and yellow blossoms, but I wonder: Will North Carolina milkweed grow in Ohio? The only way to find out is to pinch a handful of milkweed fluff and fling it across the meadow, trusting that it will alight and take root somewhere hospitable.
We've been talking a lot about hospitality in my Honors Literature class, first examining how the code of hospitality works in Homer's Odyssey and then finding variations on the theme in Cold Mountain. We've seen how wayfarers depend upon the kindness of those who are more rooted in place, how diverse people can find common ground around a meal accompanied by music and storytelling, and how those who violate the code of hospitality create all kinds of havoc. The wanderer finds rest for his journey by making himself at home in various places, hoping he can trust his hosts to send him safely on his way; when this doesn't happen--when the Cyclops eats Odysseus's men or when Teague shares a meal and music with holy men before shooting them--we see that the difference between civilization and savagery hinges on the willingness to create a home, however temporary, in the wilderness and to treat all who enter it as brothers.
I want my friend's milkweed blossoms to find a home in my meadow but it's hard to direct the seeds to any certain spot as the least puff of wind blows them out of reach and out of sight. This is how I got here too, adrift among too many homes: my little house in the woods, the parsonage in Jackson where I spend my weekends, the house up north where I visit my grandkids, the house where I grew up in Florida. I lived in six or seven houses as a child but the only one that still feels like home is the Florida house, which will soon be on the market, so we need to retrieve some valuables before the house falls out of our hands forever. Last weekend my brother and I tried to remember the things we've loved in that house--the watercolor my daughter painted, a cross-stitch piece I made for Mom, those books, that vase, those flowered chairs--but when the people we love have left the building, we can hardly call it home.
Today a colleague asked me to name my favorite place on campus, and I cast about for an answer. I love the library, of course, and my office where I'm surrounded by books and photos of birds and grandkids, and I loved the pollinator garden before it was removed to make room for fall plantings, but the place on campus where I feel most at home is in a classroom full of students wrestling with a text. It doesn't even need to be a nice classroom; the people and the stories make it home. And this, I think, is true of all my homes: the empty house in Florida, still full of stories in my memory; my house in the woods, where family gathers around a table to talk, eat, and sing; the parsonage where we make new friends by sharing stories; the grandkids' house where the future is being built by tiny hands and big voices.
Sometimes I get tired of uprooting myself every weekend to live in a whole different town, but today when I drove into that town, it felt like home. I may drift for a time like the milkweed seeds, but it's good to know that wherever I land, I can find a place to call home.
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