DK_Photos
UNOAKED
A HOME
in RALEIGH
H
HOME. ITāS A BROAD CONCEPT with a myriad OF meanings. Homer touched on it a bit with his boy Odysseus and his travels after Troyās fall; Faulkner obsessed over home and its rootedness in the past; and Iām pretty sure Bruce Springsteen would just be a dude singing in a New Jersey Applebeeās without his beloved hometown ballads. I think the overall deļ¬nition of home is ļ¬uid and personal, but Frost summed it up pretty nicely when he said, āHome is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.ā If this sounds analogous to a Best Western motel,
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by MIMI MONTGOMERY youāre not incorrect ā sometimes home isnāt 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, āYāall gonna make me lose my mind, up in here, up in here.ā Iām 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 oneās masculinity in the face of peer aggression. Either one. Admittedly, Iāve only been on this earth a short 25 years, but Iāve 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. Iām 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 wasnāt like the other newbornsā. 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
