FOWC with Fandango — Orphan
Although most of us never plan to go home again to live, there’s always somewhere, way back in our minds, the realization that if terrible things happen and everything else fails, we can go home.
We wouldn’t like it and they probably wouldn’t care for it, either. We might even hate it.
Otsego Road – Photo: Garry Armstrong
But the thought is there. Almost hidden by the rest of our lives, friends, work, children.
I never went home except for the occasional dinner. I swore when I left I’d never go back … but there was always a tiny corner in there. Not even a set of words, but a fragment of a thought. There was a last-ditch place I could be if the rest of the world collapsed around me.
I never went back, even when things were bad and I was sick. Never wanted to be there, not even briefly. Then, my mother died. Eventually, my father died though losing him wasn’t much like losing a parent. I hadn’t seen him as a parent for many long years. Garry’s father passed and eventually, his mother too. He never went home, either.
We are orphans. We can’t go home because this is home and there’s nowhere else to be. We haven’t even the fragments of those unspoken words.
Eventually and ultimately, we are all orphans.
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Categories: #FOWC, Daily Prompt, Family, Fandango's One Word Challenge, Home, Marilyn Armstrong
SERENDIPITY - SEEKING INTELLIGENT LIFE ON EARTH 
I never had a home in the sense that my parents ever owned anything. Then we had to move often because with every new child the former rental flat became too small OR my father worked in a place where he had to live nearby. The question doesn’t apply to us, in general, as in Switzerland, there are few people owning a place and keeping it long enough so that ‘children’ could return to it.
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Houses weren’t expensive when I was growing up, so almost everyone — rich and poor — had one. Jobs were also more stable. That has all changed.
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Well, just think if you could still buy a house NOW in your Cockney London?! My parents never could and were always living at the borderline of poverty. Both were working, my mum took a secretarial degree at home (Fern-Diplom) and worked every waking hour when her four kids were in bed…..
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I was thinking about this yesterday after my son had rung me for support in a (thankfully small) crisis. Both of my parents are still alive but since I left home at 17 I have never considered the possibility of going back. I’m not sure I ever actually regarded living with them as “home.” I doubt my son would want to come home, but it pleases me that at least he knows there is a home to go to.
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I think we are rather nicer than our parents were. And we have a different attitude about “home.”
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Never went back to live neither and never wanted to.
I’m glad to be were I am.
Leslie
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I never wanted to go back either, which is why I never did. But it was always in there, the idea that there was one place, if everything else failed, once could go. It wasn’t “real” in the sense that I never actually imagined going it but I think as long as parents are alive, there’s always that little tiny piece of brain …
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Most of our children have been back for one reason or other. I wanted them to feel they always had a home no matter what happened.
Leslie
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Mine too. I just wanted to get out and stay out. They never wanted to leave. Different times and I guess we were easier to get along with.
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times have changed….
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so are you saying Thomas Wolfe was right?
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Yeah. But I thought so even when I first read him a million years ago.
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