Home is such a powerful concept, but it can be in several places at the same time

Something about America has got under my skin, yet England is in my heart. What does it mean to carry a sense of home in several places at the same time?

A few nights ago I was transfixed by the sound of Sabrina Carpenter and Paul Simon singing a duet of Homeward Bound. They were performing on that absolute staple of American weekend television, Saturday Night Live, and their performance was truly extraordinary; he was softened with age, wearing a pale purple velvet suit while playing a purple guitar, and beside him, Carpenter shimmered with the power of youth in a liquid silver dress that clung to her body, and surely must have been a nod to a very similar dress Marilyn Monroe wore to sing Happy Birthday to JFK. Their performance created a poignant, tender space for the past and present to exist side by side, the harmonies of that sweet, sad, powerful song so familiar, yet also sounding so apt for right now. The song seemed to speak for this moment when so many of us are, in different ways, yearning to feel a sense of place where we feel whole and safe, in a world on fire. “Homeward bound/I wish I was/ Homeward bound….” I was stunned, tears suddenly suddenly sliding down my cheeks, since what they sang of was returning to a place to feel complete, and to feel comforted. They were singing about home, a subject I think about a lot. But their song also jolted something inside me, leaving me feeling a little confused, since the place I call home is changing.

Is it possible for home to be in two places? The place I feel most deeply at home is Oxfordshire, and west Texas. Both places hold something of my soul, but I wonder if that means I’ll forever be yearning for a place where I’m not.

Home is the corner of southern England which holds my heart, the wet clay fields and the ancient horizon of the Ridgeway and the white chalk outline of Uffington White Horse, and it’s salted crisps and a packet of Refreshers from the village shop, and it’ the fish and chips van that comes to the village on Tuesday evenings, and not every Tuesday at that; home is also the pavements of Oxford where I’ve walked since I was a child, and it is sausage rolls in a paper bag from the Co-Op and cups of tea from my favourite thermos and Digestive bisuits on a bridge track running near our house. It’s the warmth of my cheek against a standing stone at Avebury and driving through the chalk cutting on the M40 at sunset and the smell of a bonfire behind the barn and blackberries in a sticky child’s palm.

But also, home is… home is America now, too.

It’s cherry chapstick and Reese’s after school at CVS on Connecticut Avenue with the sound of the crosswalk guards whistle and it’s ping pong at Comet Pizza, and listening to Taylor Swift in traffic on the I-95 to Baltimore and the bright orange wonder of the Shenendoah in fall, and home is the taste of apple butter in Virginia and a huge glass of Dr Pepper that’s as much ice as sugar.

Having all my children with me, wherever that may be, is also when I feel most at home, and most profoundly settled

Home is a grilled cheese sandwich with extra pickles as I crack the spine of a book of poetry I’ve just bought in Politics and Prose and it’s fresh crabs at the Wharf and pretzels dipped in sweet mustard in Lancaster Market, and it’s embodied, too, by the spirit of big skies that’s everywhere in America, from pecans at a roadside stall outside El Paso to the taste of hot dust on my skin in west Texas to warm sand underfoot in Miami Beach in November and a cabin way out west in Montana to a brown bear crossing the road in Yellowstone. Home is a guitar shop in Woodstock and a coke float in Borrego Springs with the desert all around me. Home is all of this. That’s what made me cry when I heard Sabrina Carpenter and Paul Simon singing.

There is nowhere more expansive than America and that sense of possibility, of the huge horizons, is something I love most about being here

Because home is, and always, always will be, the mystical and radiant green fields of England, yet what I’m finding is that it’s also now the promise of the unending horizons of this beautiful, strange, troubled, optimistic place called America. I’m surprised by the way America is assuaging my homesickness, because a year ago, I definitely didn’t feel like this at all. Back then I felt sick for home, for England, and longed for it a lot more than I let on at the time, but carried as a constant yearning for a place which certainly wasn’t Washington DC.

America has seeped into my sense of home in a way I could never have imagined

Now, though, something inside me has shifted. Can we feel at home in two places simultaneously? I’m not into polyamory, but is this what it feels like to love two people at the same time? And if you love two places, can you ever truly feel at home, truly settled, in one place, or will your love for that other place mean you’re forever yearning for somewhere else?

Is the length of time spent somewhere directly proportional to the amount it feels like home? Maybe.