Thoughts Of Home

Justic Oliver Wendell Holmes, ca. 1902

My friend the Taoist Harlequin shared on her blog a quote by Oliver Wendell Holmes. I understand the sentiment and she's a lovely friend I have met here in blogland. She's a fine English lady. I know she's a fine lady, and I believe she is English. You may visit this post as an intro to her long running site. Go here.

Holmes wrote and Harlequin posted:

And where we love is home,
Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.
The chain may lengthen, but it never parts.

Wiki says:

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. (March 8, 1841 – March 6, 1935) was an American jurist who served as an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1902 to 1932. Noted for his long service, his concise and pithy opinions, and his deference to the decisions of elected legislatures, he is one of the most widely cited United States Supreme Court justices in history, particularly for his "clear and present danger" majority opinion in the 1919 case of Schenck v. United States, and is one of the most influential American common law judges. Holmes retired from the Court at the age of 90, making him the oldest Justice in the Supreme Court's history. He also served as an Associate Justice and as Chief Justice on the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court, and was Weld Professor of Law at the Harvard Law School, of which he was an alumnus.

Profoundly influenced by his experience fighting in the American Civil War, Holmes helped move American legal thinking away from formalism and towards legal realism, as summed up in his maxim: "The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience."

As for me, Mom and Dad ripped me out of home the first time as I entered fourth grade, and then again as I entered eighth, both of these moves involving the loss of a best friend. I was inconsolable both times and never trusted the idea of home again. Home is where they do awful things against your will unless you have the power, and even then something can happen. My third grade friend was lost until by miracle I found him on Facebook this year, my sixty-fifth on the planet.

Mom and Dad actually began moving me earlier than that but it did not give me trauma.

Here's a poem I wrote tonight in response to the Holmes quote.

Thoughts Of Home

I stood outside them,
staring in the cold window
at them, at the food
they served each other.
I saw them hug and I saw
them struggle over
all sorts of puzzles.
I never really knew inside
what that was to me.

When my mother moved
across the country, midwest
bound, I heaved a sigh
of relief...I helped
her move willingly, hopeful
this distance would help
and it did, oh yes.
Then I could stay near to her
in my words and thought.

August 3, 2011 6:33 PM