Home

 Brrrmmm-pah!

That's an onomatopoeic sound word. I learnt of it today while looking up "sounds made into words". I guess this daily writing thing is really working out for me. Look how I grow! Onomatopoeic words are playful sound words. In my youth, they would have been words I approached with a Downton-Abbey disdain and in older age, they are words I look at with childlike curious delight. Oh, Age!

Well, the fanfare at the beginning of this post is to announce that the contents below are a chapter from my first book, soon-to-be-published, and dare I dream, NYT bestseller. 

Home is a subject that has sat within me for years. I attribute it to astrology, that 4th house, now that I was made aware of this profession through life's goings on. I make no claims to the credibility of that novice-level atsro information but I do have a firm grasp of feelings 'Home' evokes (which ironically is also attributable to my natal astrogrology, pah!).

I've found the best expressions of home in J.R.R. Tolkien's words and Alexander McCall Smith's stories. There was also a book in the geography section of my grad university's library that had a collection of essays on the topic and one of them hit particularly close to, uh, home. Sadly, I did not note down the name of that book and I now wander the halls of my memories frequently in search of any clue that might lead to its title. 

'For home a song, that echoes on...' as Neil Finn's Song of the Lonely Mountain suggests. 

At different points in my life, home has meant different things to me. 

When I left the nest for foreign shores to make something of myself, home meant the people I loved. Home is where the people are, in my own words, in my writing from that time. 

At around that same time, Alexander McCall Smith's idea of home resounded a loud yes in my heart when I first read The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency - 'There are many sadnesses in the hearts of men who are far away from their countries.' Oh! How I felt every word of that sentence in a foreign land, an ocean away from my country of origin. Well, it didn't matter or occur the use of 'men' for that sentiment applied to every strand of emotion in my heart.

When The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey came out, I felt Gandalf was talking to me as he was to Bilbo when he said, 'you were born to the rolling hills and little rivers of the Shire, but home is now behind you. The world is ahead.' I was on my own little adventure too. Far away from the home of my childhood, growing up, learning to earn a living. 

The thing that I have the most gratitude for, amongst a lot of other stuff, is that there have been people who shared their vulnerabilities - their thoughts and feelings like Smith and Tolkien in those quotes - and someone like me could look at it and know I'm not alone. And that is an incomparable feeling - to know you are supported, there were people who went through the same thing you did and they said it out aloud. 

There's also a season in life where home is Erebor. 

I often think of Bag End. I miss my books. And my armchair. And my garden. See, that's where I belong. That's home. That's why I came back, 'cause you don't have one. A home. It was taken from you. But I will help you take it back if I can.

Home now is both Bilbo's Bag End and Thorin's Erebor. It's a memory of creature comforts and the quest to reclaim something that was taken away. I relate so much to Thorin and the dwarf company in their longing for an Erebor that lives in their hearts and minds, frozen in time when they last lived in it. That's the place they expect to reclaim in their quest. But that's never reality - places change just as Thorin and the dwarf company changed too. People get old, places feel the passage of time.

Maybe Thorin and company were also trying to reclaim lost honor and glory, and a rightful place in a line of belonging - finding their place in a lineage. 'From my grandfather to my father, this has come to me', states Thorin regally, wistfully, authoritatively. And that part of the story that I share with Thorin Oakenshield is for the other chapters of my book.

For now, it's musings on home. What home meant - a place, then people, then comfort, then a rightful ownership. And I'm going to keep exploring what home means to me as the years go by. Maybe freedom. Maybe stability, that that darned astrology asserts.