Home is Anywhere

by Melody Miller (United States of America)

I didn't expect to find France

In under two years I had moved ten times, between moving my mother out of her home, into an apartment, then assisted living, a nursing home and finally hospice. During that time I had also moved myself into multiple short terms living arrangements, before leaving my home state and heading to New York. When I left New York eight months later, I was returning back south with no place to call my own. It was a spring morning and my new friend Margaret was saying goodbye to me in the kitchen. She was 40 years my senior and spoke slowly, her thin grey hair framing her bony face, her intent eyes almost nervous. As I picked up the last box of my belongings, she asked me to come to Paris with her and clear out her departed father’s apartment. Knowing I’d done the same for my mother, she decided I was the one to get the job done. A month later I called to tell her I wouldn’t be coming. I was back home, with no place of my own and staying in a friend’s guest room, the majority of my life packed into a storage unit and grief still heavy from my mother’s passing as I picked up odd writing jobs to get by. When she answered the phone instead of saying no the words that came out of my mouth were, “I’m coming to Paris with you.” I arrived in Paris two months later, my second visit to that city. I was staying just blocks from the Eiffel Tower. I took one look at Margaret’s father’s apartment and knew I’d have it cleared out in the slotted three and a half weeks. There wasn’t much to go through, the biggest piece was the small library in the back bedroom where I stayed. Hundreds of books on art history. Her father-had been an art historian and the apartment was filled with paintings, vases and a variety of small statues and unusual furniture. We worked each day in short spurts of accomplishment. I discovered that Margaret didn’t want me there so much for my physical help, as for my emotional support, to have another person there with her to unpack the monumental grief that is loss. In my rare free time I wandered Paris, checking out the neighborhoods, each with their own personality. Each time I returned from an adventure and entered my temporary neighborhood of the 7th arrondissement and came to the street where I could view the tip of the Eiffel Tower, my pace slowed, my nervous system became calm and my stiff posture softened. In those first three weeks I did not realize it, but the little apartment I was staying in had become more home, than any place in months. The tourist shop owners nearby eventually realized I lived there and stopped hocking their wares at me. A traveler asked me for directions, the waiters at the corner cafe no longer made a stride to show me the menu. I became familiar with how to stop the apartment toilet from running and noticed how the mineral rich Parisian water was slowly creating a thick calcium deposit on the bottom of the sauce pan I used to boil water for tea. Life became routine. I washed my clothes in the bathtub and spent leisure time on the fifth floor front porch, watching people walk along the street below or the bird fly up from the rooftops into the pre-dusk sky. Every three days or so Margaret and I would walk to one of two coops to buy our food and eat simple meals at the tiny kitchen table. Three days before leaving I realized that the scrappy apartment we had been working in had become home. I hadn’t had a place to call home in exactly one year. I had no home to return to and no home that I’d come from. Instead I came from and returned to the generosity of friends. I was ready to leave Paris, and certain I’d one day return a third time, not because I loved it, but because like home like I had learned an appreciation for Paris.