Home is where the heart is. I had sown the seeds of my hybrid heart on Strawberry Lane

I spent one of my fifty-one years in a meager apartment on Strawberry Lane, in a rundown business district of a fading neighborhood. The bathtub didn’t hold water and my bedroom window was at ground level, separated from the parking lot by a narrow sidewalk.

Headlights, slamming door, screeching engines, and squealing tires guaranteed interrupted sleep, night or day. Metal closet doors popped off track daily and the olive, apartment-sized stove clashed with the copper refrigerator that required weekly defrosting. The single, unadvertised amenity was a slow draining kitchen sink that provided an excuse to dine out frequently.

I moved on to nicer apartments with matching appliances, walk-in closets, and adequate plumbing and eventually bought my own homes in residential neighborhoods.  Still, at the lowest points in my life, I was homesick for Strawberry Lane. Decades later, I finally understand why.

Home is where the heart is. I had sown the seeds of my hybrid heart on Strawberry Lane, when I settled as comfortably into my role as wife and mother as I had been in my role as daughter, and realized I didn’t have to give one up to have the other. I reveled in the one opportunity I had in life to have my cake and eat it too - freedom and independence yet with the security of a husband and extended family to pick me up if I fell. My world was safe, my opportunities endless, and life couldn’t have been better.

It wasn’t the building or neighborhood I longed for when I was homesick for the apartment on Strawberry Lane.  I missed the promise life offered while I lived there. Today, I feel the same homesickness for my country.

I long to return to an America that protects me and offers endless opportunity instead of glitzy amenities. I miss the Strawberry Lane America that feeds the hungry, houses the poor, medicates the sick, and hugs the lonely. I want an America where there’s a party in the courtyard at night to make up for the headlights in the bedroom window.  I want to have my cake and eat it too, not sacrifice freedom for a façade of security.  When I moved to Strawberry Lane, my father didn’t sell my security blanket to buy himself a new golf club. I wish America still loved me the same.

Daddy died of cancer in 1989. The apartment complex on Strawberry Lane burned down in 1992. A bush stole America in 2000. Maybe it isn’t too late to recover the last one.

 

Sandy Knauer