The Hearth I Carry

When I first came to Romania, I fell in love with a little kitten. He died only a month later from complications from worms, and I buried him in the forest here, in a country that was still almost entirely new to me. Around his little grave were some enormous snails, slowly moving across the moss. The image stayed with me and I later read about the symbolism of snails, who embody their homes. Over the past year, as my relationship with the idea of home has become much more complicated, I have found myself returning to it again and again.

Somewhere Between Homes

Living abroad for long enough does something strange to your sense of home. America is where I was born and where almost all of my history happened, and there are parts of it that will always be deeply mine. It shaped my memories, my perspectives, the foods that comfort me and a thousand little cultural understandings I rarely ever thought about until I left. But it doesn’t feel entirely like home anymore. I have changed while I have been away, and I see things differently now that I am looking at them partly from the outside. I could not simply go back and slip into my old life as though nothing had happened.

Romania has become home in a different way. I have a rich life here now, not an extended trip abroad. I have people I love, animals I worry about, familiar roads, favorite places, routines and memories. I know these mountains. I have celebrated holidays here, buried animals here, cooked for people here, struggled here, laughed here and accumulated all of those ordinary experiences that slowly bind us to a place. But I wasn’t born here. I arrived as an adult carrying another country’s childhood inside me, and I know there will always be ways in which I experience Romania as an immigrant.

But home isn’t simply the country where I was born, the house where my things are, or even the place where I am happiest. I think some part of home is something I carry within me.

I Am a Hearthkeeper

I am a hearthkeeper. I long for the hearth, and I carry its seed with me. That longing has very little to do with owning an impressive house. I long for warmth and life, for beauty and nourishment, for something growing outside the window and something cooking in the kitchen. I want animals underfoot and people lingering around a table. When I enter a new place, I naturally begin noticing what is there and imagining what could be added, not because the place is inadequate, but because creating home is one of the ways I interact with the world.

Maybe that is the seed I carry. I don’t carry a finished version of home that I need to recreate wherever I go. I carry memories and experience, certainly, but I also carry creativity and ability. Every home I have made has taught me something. I know how much a pot of soup on the stove can change the feeling of a cold evening, how quickly a table transforms once people begin gathering around it, and how a tradition can begin simply because someone is creative enough to dream something and then decide it is worth doing. I have learned that the magic of home appears through very small things repeated often enough that they become the heartbeat of home.

Making a home means paying attention to what is already around you and knowing what might enhance it. Maybe that means planting flowers outside the window or herbs near the kitchen, adding color to a bare room, moving a comfortable chair into the place where the afternoon light falls, or putting something beautiful on a table simply because it makes you happy to look at it. Sometimes it means feeding people. Sometimes it means planting something and tending it, caring for an animal, making a celebration out of an ordinary evening, or creating a place where people feel comfortable enough to stay awhile.

None of this requires an extravagant house. Some of the warmest places I have known have been very modest ones, because warmth has surprisingly little to do with square footage, expensive furniture or whether a room is trendy. It comes from attention. A home begins to feel alive when someone is tending it: noticing what needs nourishing, what could be made more comfortable, where beauty could be added and what is worth highlighting. Over time, those small choices accumulate until a place begins to hold the memories of the life being lived there.

The hearth has never meant simply a fireplace to me. It is the living center of a home, the place around which nourishment, memory, creativity, hospitality and care gather. A hearthkeeper tends that life, and this is the part of home I can take anywhere. I don’t need to carry the same furniture or reproduce the same rooms, and I don’t even need the same traditions. I carry the ability to notice, to nourish, to gather, to create beauty and to make new traditions when the old ones no longer fit.

Carrying the Seed

And that brings me back to the snail.

What stayed with me was not simply the cleverness of an animal carrying a physical shelter on its back. It was the idea that the snail is whole wherever it goes. Its sanctuary travels with it. It can move through an enormous world without being separated from home, and I think that is the experience I resonate with.

Immigration has made that idea more profound. America can stop feeling completely like home without becoming meaningless to me, and Romania can become deeply beloved without having to replace everything that came before it. I can become attached to a place, plant things there, make memories there and grieve what I leave behind without believing that I have lost my way home. I am not rootless. If anything, I seem to grow little roots wherever I am given enough time, just like the aggressive plants I love. But beneath those roots is something I carry with me.

I carry the seed of the hearth. I carry the memories of the homes I have already made, but more importantly, I carry what making them taught me. Wherever I go, I know how to begin again: to plant something, nourish something, make something beautiful, gather people together and pay attention to what a place needs in order to feel more alive. Eventually those acts gather memories of their own, and somewhere that was once unfamiliar becomes part of me too.

Maybe that is what I was seeing in those snails crawling around a little kitten’s grave when I had barely begun my life in Romania. I had crossed an ocean and landed somewhere where almost nothing was familiar, but I had not come without a home.

I had brought home within me.