Natalia Ilyin’s article “Where’s home,” is about her dis-attachment to the houses she’s lived in and how she never truly feels “at home.” In the article she tries to explain that she doesn’t have a three word answer “I’m from,” instead she ponders the deeper meaning of what is home. Ilyin goes on to talk about how she’s from New York, but that’s not home, and she now lives in Seattle, but that’s also not home. The author feels that even if it was the house her grandparents lived in because her grandparents’ grandparents didn’t live there she has no reason to call that home, that when the nesting, wallpaper and couches are stripped away it’s just a house that we live in. Her father tries to explain to her his opinion, that even if it’s not a house his father’s father’s father built, that the small mementos of our family’s past make it home, not just a place, but she feels we “nest” with hold no power over the place. She simply feels we have to great an attachment with the four walls that surround us.
Ilyin also believes we are merely gypsys, but with even less purpose. We live in “expensive caravans,” but have no direction, no purpose to be in them “we don’t follow an annual route of pilgrimage, hitting the same oasis every six months.” Jobs, neighbors, school and family don’t mean anything unless your greatest of the great grandparents built your caravan and carved your beds from the trees they spontaneously sprouted from.
Ilyin closes stating that beyond the island she lives on theirs the Olympic Peninsula and beyond that the ocean and she concludes that she’s run out of places to run.
I particularly like the way you begin. You give the reader a good sense if Ilyin's piece in pursuit of what home is, and her ultimate failure (at this point) to be able to clearly define what it is except by what it's not. You run out of steam at the end. Maybe it just needed to be shorter. Don't keep writing just to write. :-)
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