Part I: Home

            A first sunrise in Albuquerque, New Mexico. And then Sam (they/them), arriving in Mountain Home, Idaho two years after. My parents and our best baby friend moved to Ramstein Air Force Base, Kaiserslautern, Germany, and that’s where I grew up. Sam and I would fall asleep in our bunk bed to the Spirit soundtrack, and I wonder how many days started out with seeing Sam go down that ladder. I used to tuck an aunt-crafted quilt into the wooden frame—my first cocoon.

            Light wooden panels floored our room. On the wall opposite the doorway, where our heads would lay, was a window above the radiator. Through it was the front lawn of our apartment building from one story up. Curtains with cartoonish flowers usually colored its view pastel and blue but always let light in. This floor was my first favorite plain—my dreamscape’s front yard. Here, Sam and I would watch VHS films, craft, play with our toys, dance around to our radio or to the nonsense played by the other on our electric keyboard. The programed songs it had to play along to, most remarkably, John Denver’s “Take Me Home, Country Roads,” looped as many times as Sam and I had laughs. We learned early the need of our harmony.

            The home of my tent was apartment B2 in building 1148 on a street named after Carolina. From four to eleven, I grew in B2. The front sidewalk, paved elegantly with homely Dumble bricks colored red to sienna, went all the way to my elementary school. It was a constant guide though different elevations; installed staircases taught increment, and the tall border-adorning masonry taught precaution.

            Cylindrical boundary bricks backdropped a bench in front of the stairs which led to our building’s front doors. The first spring I could climb the towers, then about waist-high, tree blossoms welcomed me into their time of day. Their aroma overcame me; I loved to inhale it deeply and strengthen a recollection for rainy days. The light purple blossoms were so delicately dense in tubular clusters. My mom helped me harvest some to give to my teacher that year.

            ‘Out front’ is what we called 1148’s front sidewalk and lawn up to its parking spaces. Sam and I would ride our scooters on the sidewalk and hang out with the kids of the block. My mom, caring for us at home, could open the computer room window to keep an ear out for mayhem as we played. Out front was a changing and representative slate. 1148 residents needed not check the calendar to know the seasons’ swings or when school was out—they needed only to watch their steps. Spring’s arrival was the first day we’d chalk the sidewalk with color, and summer emerged from the puddles collected by hose runoff.

            Out front’s lack of structure set the stage for some memorable messes. My friend accidentally hit my temple with a golf club once on a backswing. My dad had been washing his BMW until he saw my bloody head and ran to me to carry me inside. Bless his panicked heart, he sat me in the bathroom and wrapped my skull in toilet paper. One summer evening, my mom and our upstairs neighbor, Miss Oxana, chaperoned a pool party. I don’t know the details of the agreement, but I know I’ve never seen my mom so drunk: her and Miss Oxana laughing for so long in their lawn chairs.

Part II: Neighborhood

            1148 was a relatively thin building, as wide as one apartment’s hall and branching rooms. Above us was Miss Melissa, whose husband I never met but whose hand-me-down blouse I still wear today. On the fourth floor lived Miss Oxana, her husband, and set of twins, Jeremy and Jessica. They were my best birthday friends until around 3rd grade when they moved away.

            Our street stood on a long overall slope. Many copies of our building wove through the plateau, with gazebos in between every three or so. The apartments weren’t new, but they weren’t falling apart. During our tenure, our traditional keys were replaced with thin and flat metal cards, rounded at the corners. They worked like a hotel keycard, requiring vertical insertion to open our front door. We also experienced our block’s upgrade to shoot style trash disposal, introducing me to the subterranean and granting our household some routine walks. On one, I saw my parents jokingly flip each other off for the first time. Another hosted a talk between my dad and I that I’ll never forget.

            So beloved places can be. Each unit had a balcony on the back face. The forest—a source of a core to my heart—drew an edge parallel to our building, standing far away and sunken enough for our balcony’s view to bear another land across the sidewalk. The playground—heaven of my youth. It was always so warm turning the corner from shadowed out front towards the park. Below our balcony, my dad and Sam and I would occasionally play frisbee and beware the stinkweed dressing the hill face of the forest. Opposite the sidewalk here was a lawn where friends or parents gathered before descending into playtime.

            The first outdoor staircase was accompanied at its railing by a tree I came to know as Henry. Peeling white bark lured me through willowy leaves and powdery crumples of pollen; for my journey, I was honored a hillside sanctuary. It seemed always sunny within this enveloping canopy, even on cloudy days. Or maybe it was all the climbing and upside-down swinging I was doing. After the second staircase, where I witnessed Mom remove a tick from behind Sam’s ear, the sidewalk partitioned the natural and the man-made.

            Wandering the woods and playing kickball raised me. Out front was for fleeting escapades and short playtimes before a meal. The forest and the playground staged days. A path intersected the forest reaching the end of the block where another playground stood. When Sam wasn’t willing to face the bugs with me, Baily, my friend for some years, would. She lived in the opposite end of my building on the second floor. She’d share stories about feral cats and strangers with trash bags, giving us something to explore for clues about.

            Best friends came and went. A game of kickball spanned a lifetime on the playground. Teammates gained a familial rank, elusive but true, shaped by the likelihood of us sharing no more than one summer. The playground’s structures varied greatly, forming a kingdom of distinctive regions. A special spot of solitude was the swing set on the playground’s far end. With my back towards the rest, I could face the top of a grassy hill. It was overhead more apartments, across the street from the baseball field, and was centered with a tall, tall tree. George was my first pine love and maybe my hardest goodbye to date.

Part III: Reflection

            Place for any given military kid is adopted. Before my family settled where my dad retired, the question “Where are you from?” was a puzzle with a new answer every time. Mustang, Oklahoma is where I learned to drive; Ramstein AFB is where I learned to write. I grew up in both. I feel more earnest and comfortable proclaiming to be from the home I made of the midwestern suburb where I graduated high school than the home across the sea. The latter is a nation’s node for missions; the former is heartland.

            My childhood home and community were artfully communal. The steady rotation of neighbors armed relationships with unspoken contracts which balanced dependency and non-commitment. From witnessing this and experiencing regular relational severances, I came to know place as a way of being. Place was where I could fit. And sometimes, I could only fit in my own skin. Phases when I entirely denied my need for pause, security, and comfort, have made evident that my self is the one place from where I must not move. My valiant efforts to, have pained me greatly—yet will teach me forever the fostering of safety within.

            Duration alone does not etch a place out of space. Human Geographer Yi-Fu Tuan (1977/2018) emphasizes “quality and intensity” as factors more meaningful than time spent forming attachments to place (p. 198). I believe this idea rings true for anyone experienced in relocating. By this very token, almost any space is a candidate for home. When I moved away from my family to Gainesville, Florida, I trusted the skills my past equipped me with to adapt. Two years into independence, I met the understanding that changed everything: the farther I am from my family, the farther I am from THE only thing, state, feeling, I need—which just so miraculously was with me from the start.

            Sam, Mom, and Dad don’t adore Mustang, but the lives they have built there are solid. Generations of my family are from Central and Southern California. Exceptions include my paternal grandmother from Vietnam along with her ancestors, and a rogue maternal cousin rooted in St. Petersburg whom I followed to Florida. Mustang is the only home I’ve ever physically returned to, and that steepens it as a personal homeland. The intertwining of space and time dictate, and I agree, that one “can never go back home.”

            I counted on never being able to come back. I wanted to leave Mustang before I hated it, or whatever unknown was undoubtably sure to happen. I wanted authority in where I lived and why, because I had never known staying in a home willingly or for so long. Tuan (1977/2018) quotes Freya Stark to define home: “a place where every day is multiplied by all the days before it” (p. 144). I left a life I cannot return to. But comprising that life was such import. So potent were my teenage times and so true are the bonds I share with the family still there, that spatiotemporal products remain which I can tune into and love as a visitor.

            In 2021’s autumn, I left and returned to Gainesville by plane. Right before descent, a field of cloud appeared as dense and ready as any landing strip to accept disembarking fliers; expansive enough for us to live upon and cultivate. When we broke though, I wept right there in the window seat. Gainesville was a home for the first time. Because it was not just a canopy of trees I flew above. Waiting underneath was a life I was building.

            Feeling I had come from one home to another provoked unknown comfort and stark assurance. Tuan (1977/2018) asks, “What are the consequences of rootlessness?” (p. 158). Speaking as one of America’s Air Force brats, rootlessness can grow resentment. Leaving loves behind has invited remorse wherever I go, like I can do nothing but betray them for the rest of my life. Rootlessness has accustomed me to missing—enough times now the feeling is changing. Entering adulthood, I reclaim choice. When I allow regret in, we sit together. And over tea, it transforms to gratitude. Occasionally, we like to phone in the opportunity of remaining days.

            As memories, and seemingly lives, accumulate, I learn I can only have so many. Yet, as pitstops add up to a path, my many homes have conjoined into one. This culmination I carry always; because love transcends spacetime and not all plants need roots.

Rebekah Browne (she/her) is 24 years old, with a Gemini Sun and Aquarius Rising. She has lived in Gainesville, Florida since August 2019 and is majoring in Sustainability and the Built Environment while minoring in Wildlife Ecology and Management at the University of Florida. Rebekah and her family moved around most of her life until they settled in Mustang, Oklahoma in 2013. At Oklahoma City Community College, she worked as a peer writing tutor and earned an Associates in Biology. In the 2018 volume of the college’s literary journal, Absolute, her poem “Questions to Answer” was published. Rebekah now writes under an internship for the website of UF’s College of Design, Construction, and Planning.

Reference

Tuan, Y. -F. (2018). Space and place: The perspective of experience (9th print). University of Minnesota Press.