Home is where the heart is

Last night I washed my face for the first time in several days.

That isn’t as unhygienic as it sounds – I have been taking showers and all – but last night was the first time in most of a week that I did my previously normal “take off the eye make-up, put on the face cream” ritual. It is the sort of thing that I almost always did at home, and almost never did when travelling. Certainly delaying face cream for a week while on vacay will have no long-lasting effects on one’s beauty. But for those of us of, uh-hum, a certain age, we might not want to end washing and face cream altogether. And last night was the night I made myself return to the “at home” ritual even though I am not at home since I don’t have a home.

There are a lot of things that one does at home but not when away. It’s weird how conscious I’ve become of these things, focusing on the most unimportant. For instance, my bathroom cup and toothbrush caddy ended up in my car rather than in Jessica’s basement. These are not family heirlooms – I’ve owned neither for more than six months – but I needed them with me. Such items are what you use in a home, and I guess no matter how much my lifestyle rejects the concept of home, there is something in my psyche that craves creating one.

It is not normal to be homeless.

Before anyone thinks I am complaining, I am not using the word “homeless” in the traditional sense of the word where a person lives on the street with no resources and with generally no protection from the hostile elements. People in such situations deserve sympathy and help. I don’t. My voluntary homelessness is, as they say, a First World Problem and I would add that it really isn’t a problem at all. But it’s not a normal condition and as a result there are some odd questions that it begs.

To start with, the world wants you to have an address. You must have a place to forward your mail. And I must have an address for my bank and my insurance, even though I really don’t live there. The mail problem is much less of an issue than it would have been a decade ago, thanks to that marvelous invention, online bill-pay. I’m not sure whether Al Gore saw that one coming when he invented the Internet but my hats off to him and anyone else involved with its development.

It’s a little disconcerting to have only one key on one’s keychain.

Then there is the matter of separating your stuff into what you keep with you (in your Saturn Vue, which is a vehicle pretty well designed for this purpose) and what you put in your friend Jessica’s basement. I have trouble imagining a 49-year-old middle-class American woman with less stuff than I have, and it’s still a lot. Over the past three days I have already started to discover a few miscalculations. But hey, it’s the first time I’ve ever done this so I’m going to give myself a break. That is a new concept I am grappling with: giving myself a break. I'll let you know how that works out.

And in the meantime, it’s the best kind of fall day in Omaha: mid-50’s and beautiful sunshine. Life is good, even away from home.