Home Is Where Her Heart Is

People often ask me why I write science fiction instead of regular fiction. The answer is easy: if you write regular fiction, it has to be set in the real world, which means you have to know about the place you are writing about, but I've never lived anywhere long enough to "know" it - with exception of Idaho, but I don't live there anymore - so I write science fiction because I can set the story anywhere or any time. I can make up the world, the country, the city, the street names, the people, the customs, the whole nine yards, and I don't have to worry about some wanker saying that such-and-such street doesn't exist in such-and-such city. In science fiction and fantasy, I set the rules, and as long as I stay within the boundaries of the universe I create, then I'm free to do whatever I please.

There's a kind of freedom in that. It's the freedom that belongs to all of us who lack a place that we can call home. As I said before in earlier blogs, I have no "home" as such. I grew up in the military, we moved around a lot, and we never really had a place that we could say we were from. When my grandparents were still alive, their farm in Little Valley in southwestern New York state was home. I lived there until I was two, and we'd go there every Christmas and every summer, from the time I was six until I was ten. My grandmother died when I was ten, and the farm was sold. We were living in a nearby town of Randolph, New York, at the time - my dad was in Turkey then - and we stayed there until shortly before my twelfth birthday. After we left, I never went back again except for two brief visits - one when I was 24 and one when I was 40. That's not their farm in the photo. That's just a quaint picture I found of some New England barn. My grandparents' farm is all gone now, the barn and the house demolished, the land parcelled out for mobile home lots. Once, when I was eleven, I thought I was going to live there the rest of my life; I don't know that place anymore or any of the people who live there. It might as well be another country.

North Idaho is the only place that feels like home to me now. When people ask me where I'm from, I tell them North Idaho. When I think of "home," it's always North Idaho that I think of. If I could retire today to anywhere I want with a truckload of cash, it's the place I'd go. I lived there for eleven years, longer than I ever lived anywhere else, and I lived for four years in Southeast Idaho, making fifteen years total that I lived in the Gem State. That's Moscow, Idaho, in the picture, where I went to college. I love Idaho's rugged mountains, its high desserts, its impassable wilderness areas, its towns and its cities (Idaho's "cities" would barely pass as "towns" out East, but then again the "mountains" out East would barely pass as "hills" in Idaho). And I love the space there, the way you can drive down a highway for an hour without passing another car, the way the towns have miles of undeveloped land between them, rather than running into each other like the ones here in the East do. In Idaho, there are vistas everywhere and almost every bend in the road is a "scenic overlook."

But I lost Idaho too. Gotta go where the jobs are, and there are few technical writing jobs in Idaho. So I had to leave. Still hoping to get back there again. With the grace of God, maybe someday I will, But for now, I'm where I am and "home" is where Michelle is. Her heart is my sanctuary. She's my cozy cottage, my welcoming door, my warm hearth. She's the place I run to at the end of each day when I flee the corporate world and the insane traffic. She's my friend, my counsellor, my companion, my lover, my wife, and she never fails me. Would that it were so for everyone, for everyone needs a place to call home, and home is - or at least should be - where the heart is.