Where is Home Lately?
Another Juke smorgasbord! Fifteen Juke contributors reflect on where they are, where they're meant to be, and what "home" means in the first place...
Here at Juke we have our own funny way of marking time. I call these quarterly mashups smorgasbords, because I’m from South Dakota and that was the word we used when I was a kid to mean “throw a bunch of stuff together.” For our smorgasbord posts, every three months, I write to all of our contributors with a question, and then I gather their responses into one big post. It’s a way to celebrate the community we’re building over time. It’s a way to welcome new voices. Mostly, it’s just a way to have fun together. I get a real kick out of seeing everyone all on one page. For our last smorgasbord, in April, the question was “What are you carrying lately?” We had some truly fantastic responses to that one. This time, it’s “Where is home lately?”
The smorgasbord questions are always open-ended, and I never know what to expect. Each time, I’m blown over by the incredible variety and creativity of the responses, and this time is no exception.
Once you’ve read our answers, I hope you’ll be inspired to jump into the comments and share your own thoughts.
Where is your home lately?
I’ll begin…
Tonya Morton:
I chose this question of “home” because it’s a topic I wanted to think about, myself. I am in an odd position right now with respect to home, one of anticipation and desire and (as is typical when life is changing fast) a little trepidation. My home, speaking simply, is wherever Paul and Santo are. The dude and the furry little dude. But our home, our current apartment, is in a weird state right now. We have it nearly emptied out, a couple weeks away from its listing date. Soon, this apartment will be something else–our old home–and I spend a lot of my time thinking about what the next place will be.
I’ve only chosen my own home once. In college, I found a tiny pocket-sized one-bedroom apartment for myself. $345 a month, a two-mile walk from campus, a five block walk from my favorite coffee shop. The apartment had once been an old hotel room. And, even refurbished, it was nothing special, hastily carpeted, with heat that barely worked and an original, deteriorating 1960’s pink tile bathroom with rusted water stains in the sink and tub. It wasn’t the best apartment, but I loved it. I loved it because I chose it. It was my place, in a way that nothing was before and nothing has been since.
Which isn’t to say you can’t make a place your home, even if you didn’t choose it. I made the house in Kansas into my home, though it took a while. At first, I felt like a stranger there, vacuuming someone else’s carpets and hanging someone else’s art on the walls. But with time, with paint and regular thrift shop visits, I brought myself into the place. It did become mine. And I’ve done the same here, in Paul’s apartment, over the past three years. I started with my own shelf and a desk, then a shelf and a desk and a closet, and now, as we’re planning to move, I can look around and see myself reflected all over. I do know how to fashion a home, wherever I am, but that isn’t the same as choosing.
This home search process represents something bigger to me, apparently, than finding the right square footage, or a slightly less cramped kitchen. It’s about consciously choosing what my life will be like, and not just falling accidentally into things, the way I often have. It’s about building something. And, honestly, it may be all tied up emotionally with the fact that we’re getting married this fall.
Okay, actually, maybe I should have mentioned that first…
Paul Vlachos:
Where is home lately? This is a good question for me right now, the “lately” part. I am in my home of the past 23 years, here in the West Village of Manhattan, a neighborhood that new arrivals refer to as “West Village,” without the article. The distinction is important. “The West Village” is what we have called it for many decades, although I have heard old-timers refer to it as “the lower West Side,” a term no one uses now. But “I live in West Village” demonstrates an ignorance of not just history, but also geography. It makes it sound like an entity unto itself, rather than part of Greenwich Village. I suppose I have also called it simply “the Village” for much of my life, as well.
And with that first paragraph, I realize I’m still carrying a resentment around with me. I hadn’t intended to write about that, but now that I have started, I might as well continue. We have been planning to move from the West Village for a few years. To that end, we have walked, biked, and driven all over Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn and the tip of the Bronx, up at Spuyten Duyvil, the Dutch name for “Spitting Devil.” We searched and searched and had almost settled on Bay Ridge, then we almost decided on the just-mentioned Spitting Devil, but we kept looking, weighing square footage, green space, local bakeries, tree pits for the dog, the general population, and other, less tangible factors. We looked as far afield as Beacon, New York and parts of the Hudson Valley. The discussions were endless, but necessary, as were the miles driven.
I have had secret fantasies of living in California or New Mexico. I have told my significant other about them at every chance, so maybe they’re not so secret. No matter, the final decision is *almost certainly* uptown in Manhattan, probably the East Side, but no guarantees. I’m being cagey here. I realized a few months ago that I either would not or could not leave the island, this small island called “Manhattan”off the coast of the United States That is my red line - for the moment. Maybe prying myself from the West Village is difficult enough. Either way, that’s where it stands. And what does this mean? It means getting out of this apartment before we find another one. That involves packing, lots of packing, while leaving it habitable. We are doing this in stages, moving out before we have a place to move to. The stuff, the detritus of our lives, is going to a storage place in Jersey.
We may be nomads for a while. I’m looking at it as a great adventure, but it’s not easy. I’m packing as though we are going on a long trip. Friends of mine who live in the Village have been acting as though I am moving to the Carpathian Mountains. I have to remind them that I’ll be 4 miles away as the crow flies and 25 minutes by subway. They act as though I’ll never see them again. Because New York City, much to the surprise of visitors, is like a bunch of small towns. Every block is a tiny ecosystem here. But I digress again.
I’m in the place I have called home. And I have written about how “home” is where the dog pack roams, where the family is, where the clothes hang, where the mail comes. Home is also where the heart is, and that appears to be more than just an apartment. In this case it’s the skinny, crowded, noisy, dirty, magnificent island of Manhattan, once synonymous with “New York City” before we swallowed Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island in one big gulp. The place we eventually land will be home, as well, and we hope to figure it out sooner, rather than later, but what does it all matter? It’s a strange time in America. I don’t talk about politics here at Juke, which is a relief, but I can say this: it feels good to be in New York City right now.
I was born on the Upper East Side, but that means little. I have, at different times, wished to live in London, Paris, Albuquerque, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Las Cruces and New Orleans. I guess I’m a bit dim because it took me decades to realize that I like living in cities, where you can walk out the door, run into somebody and have an impromptu chat about nothing, where you can get any food you want, often at any time you want, where you can find good bookstores, bakeries, museums, galleries, parks and bike paths, where you can walk around endlessly and see new things. Where complaining is a local sport, but tolerance is also part of our DNA. I lay much of this on the original Dutch settlers, but every last group from every last nationality, race, gender, occupation and interest has made this city what it is. It’s a city of immigrants. It’s also a city of fat cats, artists, tradespeople and recluses. Serendipity, majesty and anonymity. I could quote George M. Cohan, I could quote E.B. White, I could quote Joey Ramone, but I’ll just say that I’m at home right now.
Damon Falke:
Where is home lately? The question of what makes for home is a difficult one. Part of what makes the question difficult, for me anyway, is my want of a singular answer. Of course, home is composed of many things, many feelings, many places and people. Happiness may be a warm puppy. It also may be “a smooth sidewalk,” at least according to Mr. Schulz, and I see no reason to disagree. But my desire for a singular answer satisfies something within me. Perhaps it signifies the desire for a certainty. A Security? A confidence? I don’t know. The truth is we encounter little in our lives when the answer is THIS. Do we need a drink of water? Maybe, but our answer might depend on the source of the water or the intensity of our thirst. No. We are more complicated than THIS. Too, there is an important qualifier to the question of where is home lately, and that is the word “lately.” And lately, home has been late nights at my mother’s house, surrounded by Dad’s books and memories of our talks. It has been my mother’s stories, my sister’s stories. Home lately has been home passing. Yet if I have been touched by those things that we call home—if any of us have been touched—then we will go on with them. We will do so in our own way, within our own stories, in our own places, and with those who have loved us, whether they are with us or not. That is what we do or what we learn to do. We go on.
Ned Mudd:
Constance Christopher:
A photograph of one of my earliest paintings,1977. It is the first thing I see when I enter my apartment where I have lived since 1977. That is because it is hung on the far wall diagonally across from where I take off my shoes and deposit groceries. I have no title for it. Never did. Only an even older painting “Pirate,” has a name. I share this painting for the idea of "home lately,” (maybe finally a name?) because it draws me in, even after all these years. And my husband, too, when he comes home, and my friends visiting. Back when I used to divide the living room in half with a door on ladders for a writing desk, an old typewriter, and a bookcase divider in back and the other half for oil painting by the front window, I was excited with the smell of oil and turpentine, the act of cleaning my brushes. Prepping rags, too. I rented a studio finally. Currently, I am editing a novel I finished, tired from revisions, seemingly endless. I have never shared my paintings with the outside world. They are a joy to do, like an ever enlightening retreat where mistakes don't exist. The painting I am doing now is a 7.5ftx6ft oil that, like “Pirate,” has been given a name “The White Goddess." Based on Robert Graves' book, the figure at the work's center has what appears to be a lit bulb for a skull. From her neck and shoulder her arms, like a shaman's scarfs, spread with a centripetal force against fierce winds. She is protecting the transforming creatures that thrive in her world. She herself grows from the trunk of a tree whose roots spread along the base of the work. The painting is personally something to deal with. As most of my work does, it originates from my early sense of defiance that helped me persevere in a crooked, unsafe world, literally. Transcendence and transformations that occur in literature and art and in flights to the natural world offered me gifts signifying change. Hope, faith, mutability, and a place in progress foretold in the cycles of history and time. Home that is. Earth. So here it is, "Home Lately."
Sue Cauhape:
Paradise … "a place of extreme beauty, delight, or happiness …"
Home is in my garden. After three months of weed-whacking and yanking anything outside the parameters of "gardens," I sit in my lawn swing and enjoy the results. Bags of wildflower seeds have given us a jungle of remarkable beauty with strange, unrecognizable flowers. Wildlife provides me with a daily drama of their territorial struggles and quests for food. And occasionally tragedy brings a bit of melancholy when a favorite wild resident meets its death. One of my little toads drowned in one of the water pans. I don't know what happened, but a shadow fell upon paradise that day. It is sometimes said we can't have Eden without a snake.
Another downside of this bounty is the allergies that have exiled me back to the house and barcalounger. At least there's a big window looking out on this splendor, so not all is lost. We often greet the day with a long pause in front of that window to remind us it's worth plying our elderly energies to steward our environment. So, home is not just where the heart is, but where beauty can be encouraged to expose itself to the sun. Comfort can be found in a favorite chair, and safety from an increasingly uncivil world can find refuge behind the backyard fence.
Matt Layne:
My heart longs for it when I'm away. The familiar scents of mud and rot and earth and manure. The sound of cicadas. The defiant glow of fireflies. The rain, rain, rain of summer in Alabama. The heat, the baking heat when I first sit down in my car. The humidity and dampness, and goodness and badness, and beauty and horror of home.
Fried okra.
Fat heirloom tomatoes bursting to be et up.
So much freaking squash.
I think I'll paddle down the Cahaba soon. Maybe holler up at Ned Mudd from down on the river and see what he and Joyce are getting into.
Home is here. Where are you?
Anthony Head:
Home is The Compound. The Compound is three and roughly one-quarter acres of sticks and stones in Hays County, sort of the southeastern badlands of the magnificent Texas Hill Country. My mail has been (semi)reliably delivered here for more than 18 years—and that is a world record for me (and, I’m sure, for the post office). Little did you also not know that my first correspondence with JUKE was written from this location, this place, this home, this The Compound.
Here, I write and do other things. The cedars and oaks and mesquite are full and green right now from the recent rains. As of July 10, 2025, I feel fortunate to be on high ground, but I know how vulnerable it all soon becomes to the ongoing drought and fires and cyclones. By August those trees will most likely appear sunpoisoned and weary like the rest of us. It’s hard to not take the weather personally in Texas, considering they already know how to control it. Enduring two decades of blistering dry hot summers, the kind that come with toxic levels of heat and light and mosquito venom, entitles Texans to a free three-day, one-night stay in an air-conditioned Minnesota basement in February. Which means that I’m just two more summers away from my own spot picked out in upper Koochiching County.
I don’t have a fence, but I have three country mutts who don’t hold that against me. The dogs join in the rhythms and patterns of white-tail deer, wild boar, armadillos, and hummingbirds, which also have the run of the place. You can’t begin to imagine how many parasites and worms and ticks and dirt those rascally dogs introduce to our house, our beds, and our supper plates when we’ve fallen asleep on the couch after nachos.
Here, I await handwritten letters from Damon to arrive by (semi)reliable mail. I am in relatively quick reach of Kirk when the need to drink beer arises. I don’t know how many more ridiculously, oppressively hot summers I have left to suffer through. But if my wish was granted I’d remain right here on The Compound until I pay off my damn 30-year mortgage—which comes with that “missing” night from year 20 in upper Koochiching County, added on with no extra fees.
After that, I can’t say where home might be.
Jodie Meyn:
Every horizon holds another horizon. I am eternally in the no man’s land of my children’s life-burgeoning events. Packing up or putting away, planning or cleaning Buying a new dress for a dance and donating old ones. Signing up for the next sport before finishing the one we’re in now. One will go to college this year. Still, the youngest needs his baseball uniform cleaned. I KNOW that I’m 47. I can feel it. I am planted. I am home. Every once in awhile I threaten to buy a new house. To move clear to the other side of … town. But there’s too much home here. Sure, we have gone exploring. Sure we will again. But this, my old Kentucky home, Just seems to be the place.
Tabby Ivy:
Where is home? What is home?
I think you have to know the answers to both questions to really know where home is. And lately I do not recognize this place I have always called home. By that I mean America. I do not recognize my own country and that scares me. Is this the country where I grew up? With the Statue of Liberty invoking “give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to be free”?; where as a twelve year old I had a crush on John Kennedy, and wrote a school paper about Jackie?
I’ve never been a flag-waving patriot, but I have given thanks that I was lucky to be born in this country, lived a good life, and on balance was proud to call America home. Not lately.
What is this place where people are kidnapped off our streets by unidentified masked people and sent to other countries without due process? Where the richest amongst us gleefully ends and closes agencies that provide life-saving aid to the poorest and most helpless around the world - aid labeled “from the American people”. Where Universities, Law Firms, and the Press are targets for retaliation from our own government. Where the Rights of all our citizens and people are not equal.
Where is home lately? I haven’t a clue. But it certainly isn’t here.
Rebekah Wilkins-Pepiton:
Inishowen peninsula, County Donegal, Ireland is home for the summer. The coastline is rugged and wild and rain falls almost every day. In the wildflower meadow behind the farmhouse sits a copse of trees. This is no ordinary forest, it is a fairy forest where adults must be accompanied by a child. It is composed in part by plum, hawthorn, alder, and blackberry brambles with foxglove thrown in for color. The former barn outbuildings currently house firewood, bicycles and my studio. It is a gift to have the space; space to think, space to make big messes, and space to play.
Charlie Pepiton:
In June of 1964, a young Italian theatre director arrived with his Norwegian theatre company in Holstebro, Denmark. Since then, Odin Teatret and Eugenio Barba have been working, training themselves and guests, and collaborating with artists and community groups from all over the world. Their core membership has remained somewhat constant for over 60 years, and are now in their 70 and 80s. It is an improbable tale of resilience. In 6 decades, Odin Teatret has created a unique field of artistic research, Theatre Anthropology. “The study of the human being in a situation of organised representation.” What that means in practice, is a living tapestry of world performance forms brought together via ongoing “barters” with theatre companies, artists, and musicians from around the world.
I’ve been at Odin Home, a 10 day symposium, in Ringkøbing, Denmark, along with 45 other performing artists from 16 countries across 4 continents. Home is a third theatre—outside of commercial institutions and yet apart from the avant-garde. And it has been good to be home.
Sean Downing:
Where is Home Lately?
not in the place
with the bills
the unfinished dishes
expectations
and laundry shoved into corners
when company comes
furniture and
words carefully
arranged like a life
someone else might recognize
lately it's been
in the spaces between
what I thought I wanted
and what my bones
actually know
about belonging
sometimes it's just
the weight of my own voice
hoping to be heard
in the darkness
before I remember
I'm supposed to be
someone who is quieter
home is the moment
when I give up
apologizing for the sound
my truth makes
as it finally
breaks freeFran Gardner:
Where is home lately?
The one-word answer is “here.”
The longer answer is that I am back home after years in assisted living.
This home, on Main Street (not Wall Street!) is where I park my wheelchair. A duplex where my husband, unmarried for the first 64 years of his life, still lives like a bachelor. His domain is the top floor. I stay on the ground floor, and neither of us goes into the basement except when he does the laundry.
This home is my base for Bus Therapy road trips, and lunch at the Ikoi No Kai program at the Japanese Methodist church around the corner, and excursions around the neighborhood.
My home has hardwood floors and many windows. It’s surrounded by huge street trees of the kind the city won’t let you plant anymore. The sidewalks are rough and broken. The houses are mostly old, from the early 20th century or before.
People walk their dogs. Crows strut in the street. People park cars and move them. The landscapers from the apartment building next door butchered our tall camellia where it overhangs their driveway, dropping messy blossoms in the spring. Well, it will still do that. Let them clean up the mess.
Luciano Conte:
They say home is where the heart is. I've tested that theory extensively.
I've lived in Italy, where conversations flow like wine and corridors stretch into ancient corners. I've called the USA home, with its restless energy and sprawling ambition. Canada has welcomed me with its quiet vastness and polite persistence. For sixteen months, I wandered the northern hemisphere, chasing seasons and stories. And, I spent nine more months in the southern half, back when the vagabond in me could still shoulder a heavy backpack.
Somewhere between passport stamps and torn boots, I discovered something unexpected: home isn't where my heart is. Home is where my stuff is.
Not just any stuff. My stuff. The coffee mug that my daughter gave me etched with "my father is an artist." The living room chair that knows the shape of my spine. The kitchen knife that fits my hand like thought. The pillow that remembers how I sleep.
I've reached an age where I can't do without these curated comforts. They're not just possessions but the infrastructure of my contentment. Each item earned its place through trial and all those years of making do with whatever was available in temporary spaces.
The young traveler in me might have called this surrendering. But I know better now: I've learned to arrange my own small corner of this world.
Home isn't geography, or even a feeling in my chest. It's the quiet order of objects that support the life I've chosen. It's my books, spine-out, in the order that makes sense to me. It's my kitchen timer that runs twenty seconds too long.
Again, and without apology, home is where my stuff is. And it's here to stay.
(*Luciano is our newest contributor! Look for his poem on Monday.)
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I loved all the contributions, they were lovely. you must have caught me on a bad day. kind of feel like a "Debbie downer" in the mix, sorry, such is life these days. BUT!!!!! oh WOW, what fabulous news on your upcoming wedding. I am oh so very happy for you both. this is just fabulous. congratulations.
First of all, Tonya and Paul and Santo, congratulations on your future adventures bound with love. And second, what a powerhouse of essays. And welcome to Luciano.