On Finding Your Shire
There’s a two-story, yellow Victorian home still standing on North 10th St. in Rochelle, IL.
That's the place I grew up.
More or less.
Where is your shire?
It’s a place where many of my coming of age memories still live. The house was situated in a bare corner yard. We planted trees, a few of which are quite large today. My dad loved those trees. So much so, a cranky neighbor across the street would mock him for his arbor care. I learned to mow grass at that house. Dad consistently warned me not to mow over his small trees. I was a novice and more than a few seedlings didn’t make it.
The neighborhood was part of a lengthy city block (small-town block?). At eight years old, it felt remarkably long to me. One of our neighbors, an older lady named Mary, owned a couple of lots on the block, with a grove of trees on the far side of her yard. Those trees were a haven for climbing and a clandestine spot to stash winter boots in late winter. Mom insisted I wear boots over my sneakers to school, but I detested them. So, on my way to school, I would hide my boots in those trees, reveling in the freedom of sneakers, and retrieve them on my way back home.
In the Summer, I could ride my bike anywhere I wanted within about a 10-block range. I wasn’t allowed to cross Highway 51 on one side, and not supposed to go past Cooper Park on the other . I was in trouble for crossing both boundaries without permission more than once
I read every book in the children’s section of the Rochelle public library. I went a lot, considering I had to get special permission to go to the library because it was across Highway 51. (Going to the library without permission may have been one of the times I was in trouble.) My first venture into the adult section of the public library resulted in a hardback copy of Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie. I walked out the door with my book, quite pleased that I had arrived into full maturity as an 11-year old.
These were my own personal wonder years. It was home.
We moved when I was 12, and I remember being sad about this.
Frankly, my life has been relatively rootless since then, at least in terms of place. It’s not something I complain about. In fact, it’s been a privilege to see and experience everything that I have. Rootlessness has just been my reality. I did my later growing up years in suburban Atlanta. The fam moved to another home further out of in the country around the time I graduated from high school. Then I moved away.
My family has sojourned from Tennessee to Outer Mongolia — and back again. Sort of. We currently lay our heads down at night in South Carolina — and are a little amazed it’s been nearly ten years since landing here. Renee’ and I are always open to laying our heads down someplace else. Nomadic instincts are mine, both by genetics and circumstance.
I think about the idea of home a lot. Particularly, its lack of definition in my life. Many of the stories I love define home as two things: a place and a people: the literary meaning of The Shire. This is also the idea behind one of my favorite Mongolian words.
Голомт (pronounced like the Tolkien character Gollum with a T at the end) is a word in the Mongolian language roughly translated home-town. A голомт could be a place where one has grown up (my yellow house on 10th Street), but there’s a deeper sense of a place you come home to. Your голомт is both the unique people and place where you have a personal, physical, and even spiritual connection to “home”.
It’s a beautiful concept, and it makes me a both wistful and hopeful. Home is a more complicated word than we first imagined.
So here’re my questions for you today.
Where is your Shire?
How would you define your голомт in terms of people and place?
