❤️FIELD GUIDE 36: Home is where the heart is

Getting to where we want to be and where we need to be in life, are two very different things.

There are also times when we THINK we are where we need to be until we realize we’re not. In these moments, we are lost or we feel stuck. Being found or finding yourself takes time, growth, and sometimes it even takes grief.

This week, Amie is sharing her journey to finding herself, complete with trials, failures, loss, and successes.

As we close out this week, I ask you to take some time to find your mental clarity. How you choose to gain that is up to you. Hectic schedules take the front seat this time of year, but you deserve to find peace.

-Skyler

Name

Amie McGraham

Habitat

Maine

Occupation

Runner & writer

Soundtrack

Sometimes I feel as if I’ve lived everywhere! I definitely share my dad’s wanderlust. His career in oceanography propelled us from coast to coast; my parents and I never lived anywhere for more than three years at a time. Annapolis, Miami, San Diego, all in the span of less than a decade. When I was eight, we moved across the country to the small island in Maine where my parents had first met twenty years before.

They divorced when I was eleven, and for the next 23 years, I ran on bad decisions, bong hits and Budweiser. I moved off the island to live with my dad and his new family, then struck out on my own at sixteen. Three different high schools in various small Maine towns. Married at eighteen. Divorced at twenty. Southern California a few years later where a short-lived job in copy writing for an advertising agency led to a year in Oslo, Norway which later turned into an unexpected career in dental insurance.

Eventually, a 12-step program saved my life. I met the man who would later become my husband of in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous. I was promoted to VP of sales at the insurance company. I ran the Boston Marathon, and later a 50-mile ultramarathon. And I finally finished college, with a degree in English.

But my childhood aspirations of being a writer did not materialize until eight years ago, when I quit the insurance career and became a full-time caregiver to my mom who had Alzheimer’s. She still lived in the centuries-old farmhouse on the small island in Maine where I grew up, and as the only child, I had to call the shots. All of them: financial decisions, legal decisions, healthcare decisions. and I logged nearly as many frequent flyer miles between Phoenix and the East Coast as I had in my business traveling days. I was determined to keep her at home; it was familiar to her and at least one of us would still be rooted.

I took care of her in our island home for four years, and during that time, I reconnected with school friends I hadn’t seen since our grade school years at the island’s three-room schoolhouse, as well as neighbors, friends and former fans of the cooking newsletter she wrote and illustrated for thirty-some years. We did so much together in those years: picnics at the beach, walks through the woods, breakfast at local cafes, lunch at the island general store, field trips to the coastal botanical garden. And, of course, church.

Evidently, the universe has a sense of humor.

Twice a week I took her to the tiny church where I’d attended Sunday School so many years before. Never had I dreamed I would set foot in that church again, but even as Alzheimer’s chipped away at her memory and identity, my mom remained a lifelong devout churchgoer. And although religion was not for me—I had found both spirituality and a user-friendly higher power in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous—I dutifully attended church with her in those last years of her life.

This religion in which I had been brought up did not allow medicine, drugs or alcohol. In an odd twist of fate, there we were, sober me, and mom, with a disease that she would not acknowledge. It was a true test of faith for both of us.

As her dementia progressed, I turned to writing. I wrote in fits and starts, a sentence here, paragraph there, in the darkness of early morning while my mother restlessly slept. Writing soothed me and I often found answers to the constant fears and doubts of being a caregiver. I started a flash blog for other caregivers. I published a few personal essays in various literary magazines. And until recently, most of my writing occurred in that island home of my childhood, where I was ghosted by three generations of family writers and artists.

My mom passed away at a care home not far from the island last year, and my father took his final sail this past summer. I have inherited the old island house where I now spend my summers. And I have inherited my ancestors’passion for writing. Their aura permeates every barnboard bookshelf, every cedar clapboard.

Still, the rootlessness lingers. All my life, I have searched for home, Dorothy lost in an Oz-like existence. And I have come to realize that this vision of home as a physical place lies within my own flawed conception, not my family’s rootstock.

It wasn’t until this year, with the recent passing of my parents, that I truly understood how words and home are rooted together. How they flow like the brook from the backyard into the cove on the island. How I am merely their conduit from heart to page. How they happen in a place not always confined to a geographic location. How, like a mother’s love, they always, always, start in my heart.

And as I embark upon the launch of a new foodletter—the reboot of Cook & Tell, my mom’s cooking newsletter—from the kitchen/studio of the desert home I have lived in for the past twenty years (the longest I’ve ever stayed in one spot), my heart is finally settled.