Hints and Guesses
Perhaps the sense of loss we sometimes feel over small things points us to our longing for something greater.
By Leslie Gelzer-Govatos
I have never considered myself prone to strong attachments to material things—and yet, in the summer of 2023, I found myself standing on a gravel driveway in front of a Nebraska farmhouse, dripping sweat and sobbing my heart out over the prospect of saying goodbye to a dresser.
There was nothing attractive or noteworthy about this piece of furniture. It had belonged to my parents for many years before they passed it on to me, but it was hardly a family heirloom. Over the years it had become more and more rundown, and now some of the drawer pulls were missing, some of the wood trim damaged. There were stains on the front from the time years earlier when my young children had gotten hold of perfume and sprayed it on one of the drawers. At first the marks were a perpetually irritating reminder of the act of naughtiness; over time they became more of a humorous, even sweet reminder of when my children were little and mischievous. But whatever spin you put on it, the marks were unattractive and the dresser was in no condition to sell, or even donate. Still, something about seeing it sitting forlornly at the curb broke my heart a little. The dresser both reminded me of my parents and my childhood and was a physical testament to the beautiful, messy realities of my life as a mother. It represented something much more profound than furniture—and despite my better judgment, I couldn’t bear to let it go.
My husband and I were in the midst of our fourth relocation (and our eighth move between houses) since our marriage fourteen years earlier. After so many moves, getting rid of furniture (or anything else for that matter) had become fairly routine. When we first married, we never imagined such a peripatetic lifestyle awaited us. But our plans for ourselves had shifted and been upended time and time again, particularly since my husband had gone back to school for his PhD.
In May of 2023, we were living in Nebraska when he received a job offer nearly a thousand miles away in Louisiana. We’d spent the summer since then dealing with the logistical headaches of trying to secure housing in a new place and figure out how to transport five children and all our belongings down south. Complicating matters was the fact that the job he’d taken was a postdoc, by definition a temporary position. Looming in the back of our minds was the knowledge that within a few years we’d be doing this all over again.
Still, we were excited for our new adventure and hopeful for what it could mean for the future of our family. We threw ourselves into the work of packing and cleaning. We relentlessly purged extraneous things, trying to whittle down our belongings to what could fit into the single moving truck we’d rented. I have minimalist leanings anyway, and over the years I have become increasingly inured to the emotional challenges of getting rid of possessions. Ruthlessly, I went through the baby gear, the outgrown clothing, the art projects. It was easy to get rid of things—until suddenly it wasn’t. As I stared at our worn-out piece of furniture sitting on the curb, everything about this move suddenly became very hard.
Growing true roots anywhere is a desire that has long eluded me.
I felt no real sentimental attachment to the dresser itself. I didn’t need it. I didn’t even really want it. Nevertheless, it suddenly felt like the loss that was going to tip me over the edge. I felt that I could not make myself get rid of even one more thing. I had already thrown away so much, and each thing, in its own way, was a part of what had made our house home for the past three years. As I packed and decluttered, I was also saying goodbye to a place I had grown to love. And as I stood in the driveway, I felt an overwhelming grief, a sense of being, in that moment, without a home.
As I struggled to articulate what I was feeling, my husband, over my half-hearted protestations, hauled the dresser back up the long driveway and made room for it in the truck. We optimistically told ourselves we’d refinish the dresser and give it a new life in our new home, but two years later, it’s still sitting in our Louisiana garage. Whenever I look at it, I feel a mix of foolishness that we dragged it all this way and gratitude that my husband didn’t try to talk me out of my moment of grief in the driveway. I felt keenly that day both the fact that we were leaving our home and the fact that we were leaving a place that had never truly been our home in the way that my heart yearned for it to be. As much as I loved our Nebraska place, it was just one more stop on a journey that remains open-ended. But that day, holding on to something that had lived with us for so long helped give me a sense of groundedness that I really needed. It simulated the sense of having roots.
Growing true roots anywhere is a desire that has long eluded me. Even growing up in one hometown, stationary throughout most of my childhood, I felt a sense of something missing. Perhaps it’s because my parents were themselves transplants to our area: my siblings and I grew up far from nearly all our extended family members, and I never had a sense of family presence in our area that predated our own arrival there. I liked our town well enough, and I enjoy going back to visit as an adult, but I’ve never felt that I belonged there in a particular way.
My desire for a physical home is a stand-in, in much the same way my need to hold on to the dresser was.
What does it take, I’ve often wondered, for people to feel they have a place that is definitively theirs? Some of my friends seem to feel a deep attachment based on a long family history in a place—living in a home that’s been in the family for generations, perhaps; or being intimately familiar with places that were important to their parents and grandparents before them. Others, like the farmers I’ve known, have an attachment to the land itself, a sort of continuous feedback loop where they care for the particular place where they live, and are sustained by it in return.
I’ll never experience rootedness in either of the ways I’ve just described, but every time I move to a new place, I feel myself reaching out, compelled to embed myself in my surroundings in some way. It’s a desire that seems to defy logic: why attach yourself somewhere you know you’ll only be for a short while? Isn’t it just asking for heartbreak? I know that every time I leave a place, it hurts to say goodbye to the home that it’s become; and it also brings a deeper hurt to the surface—that unshakeable sense that home must be something more than the collection of belongings, memories, and relationships tied to one particular location.
There are so many cliched sayings about how home isn’t always a physical place; it’s “where the heart is.” I think there’s some truth to this, but I also find the idea inadequate to fully answer my questions about making a home. After all, as human beings we can’t detach ourselves from the importance of the material world, and neither, really, should we try to. Not completely, anyway. We are embodied beings and therefore, our home isn’t meant to be reduced to some abstract idea of togetherness. It’s certainly more than its physical components, but it still needs them.
When I stop to think about it, I see that even though there is very little that I’ve accumulated in any permanent way over the years, there are all kinds of things I cling to as part of my physical experience of home. There is the truly impractical number of books we have dragged along from place to place—when we move into a new house, our bookshelves are one of the first things we set up, packing them full of our children’s picture books and novels, our assortment of classic works, past book club selections and gifts from family and friends that bear handwritten inscriptions. There’s the simple Willow Tree nativity set we got as a wedding gift that goes up every Christmas, and the Sadao Watanabe print of the Last Supper that we always hang in our dining area.
But we’ve also created permanence through family traditions and rituals, making it a priority to open up our physical space and share it with others. Wherever we are, we like to host a carol sing between Christmas and Epiphany. From one year to the next, we might be in a new place with a new set of faces, but this party is an important part of our family life and our sense of home. So is hospitality in a general sense. When we arrive in a new community, we are always willing to make the first move to get to know people. Our home is not just for us; it exists to be a blessing to others. Part of what makes us at home in a place is knowing we’re welcoming other people under our roof, both sharing our physical space and our hearts with them and enjoying their fellowship and their insights about the community we’ve entered.
These ways of rooting ourselves have been critical to our sense of home as a family, but the longing for something more persists, and I think my inability to get rid of that dresser two years ago speaks to that fact. I long for someplace that feels more permanent, for an end to our years of wandering. I’d love to settle in a place where I never have to move again. But I suspect that even if I do settle in one place and stay there for the rest of my life, my longing won’t fully disappear. My desire for a physical home is a stand-in, in much the same way my need to hold on to the dresser was. Both are symptoms (“hints and guesses,” T.S. Eliot would call them), as C.S. Lewis famously observed, of being “made for another world.”
The dresser, like everything else about my current, earthly sense of home, is pointing me somewhere better.
I’ve been familiar from childhood with the passages from the Biblical book of Revelation which describe the eternal home of the people of God. In strange, apocalyptic language, a city is described, shaped like a giant cube, fantastically constructed out of the richest, most dazzling materials imaginable. Over the years some of the passages in Revelation have felt silly to me—the tedious descriptions of the city’s dimensions, the laundry list of precious gems that makes my eyes glaze over. I’ve wondered if it’s all some bizarre metaphor far beyond my comprehension.
But over time what has stood out to me is the physicality of the images. These are gates you can enter, roads you can walk on. Here is a river you can wade in and trees with fruit you can eat. Heaven isn’t merely described as some sense of being close to God—it is painstakingly fleshed out as a real place. It is a new place, different from any we’ve ever known and, I think intentionally, difficult to even imagine. But it will be home: more, and not less, embodied than any we’ve ever known.
Perhaps this seems like all the more reason to let go of my attempts to create a sense of home here on earth. None of it will satisfy my deepest longings, so why bother? But I’ve concluded the opposite: that knowing my true home is Heaven can inform my attempts to make a home in this lifetime and enable me to continue reaching toward something better. When I surrender myself to the impermanent nature of earthly existence, I can invest in making home where I am.
In a world of uncertainty, change, and loss, creating an intentional, welcoming earthly home can help us to orient ourselves toward eternity and invite other people to join us on the journey. We can welcome others, even when our home is messy and imperfect (mine always is). We can show people how much we value them by investing the time to get to know them, even when we’re aware the relationship might not—even probably won’t—last forever. We can delight in the peculiar blessings God provides for us everywhere we go (although I admit that my family appreciates the beautiful magnolia flowers in the south far more than the hordes of bloodthirsty mosquitoes). Most of all, we can bear in mind that all these echoes of true home and lasting community are leading us towards something better, something truly permanent, something we can constantly make our hearts ready to enjoy—by enjoying and investing in the fleeting here and now.
One of these days my family will once again be packing up our massive quantity of books and sorting through the clothes and the art projects and, yes, even the furniture. We will probably say a final goodbye to our rundown old dresser, and although I might cry again, grieving the loss of earthly possessions, I will remind myself not to despair. The dresser, like everything else about my current, earthly sense of home, is pointing me somewhere better.
Illustrations by Sarah Clark, from photos by Krišjānis Kazaks on Unsplash (street with lamp), Britt Fowler on Unsplash (fall), Beau Keally on Unsplash (New Orleans street), Tomas Martinez on Unsplash (uprooted tree), Hans Isaacson on Unsplash (map of United States), print by Hadao Watanable (Last Supper)
Leslie Gelzer-Govatos lives in Baton Rouge with her husband and six children, utilizing her undergrad degree in Philosophy to answer questions like “Are you real?” and “Can we bring our toys with us when we die?” She has written for Well Read Mom magazine and the Dappled Things blog and runs half marathons when she has free time.
