Featured Blog: Eileen Waggoner

This week’s featured blog greets us with Eileen Waggoner who is a third-year English Literature and theatre student at Shepherd University. Spending the year studying abroad in Plymouth, England, she maintains a travel blog of reflections and photographs of her adventures.

Her blog can be found at http://theexpatdiaries.tumblr.com/ and is updated regularly during her time abroad. Her featured post titled “home: /həʊm” was published on December 10th, 2013 and can be viewed below:

home: /həʊm/

 

This morning, I asked google to define “home”.

 

The omnipotent Internet/millennial life force came up with a few things to say, but the very first was this:

 

•the place where one lives permanently

 

I have a problem with this. With permanency.

 

‘Permanently’ sounds like infinity to me.

 

[I say the word again and again to myself until it loses its meaning, until it becomes a string of vowels and consonants, until it becomes a disembodied rhythm of its own.]

 

I have always been fascinated by meeting people who have spent their whole lives growing up in the same house, in the same town, maybe never really venturing past its outskirts. I think there’s some undefined beauty to that. I appreciate that story.

 

But for me, I never spent more than a year or two in the same place and I think that defined the way I live as an adult.

 

Movement, flux, transition.

 

There’s a restlessness in my bones that settles in every few weeks now even, that’s only satiated by long train rides and map-gazing. I travel because I have to. I move because I can’t stop moving.

 

[I blame my Grandmother’s stories and my impressionable 18 year old self reading On the Road]

 

I am thankful that this restlessness coincides with my present geography; on the front porch of continental Europe.

 

I have spent the past few years in serious contemplation of “home”. I remember writing my college [for you British readers, “uni”] entrance essays about finding home and leaving home, but I don’t think I really learned the weight of those words until I first left West Virginia for Wyoming. And then, y’know, across the pond.

 

You see, home to me is where I settle long enough to unpack my suitcase. I think I could make myself happy just about any place with the right people. But then again, I’ve been lucky; I’ve settled in some beautiful places and befriended absolute gems of human beings. In recent years, I’ve been lucky to never really feel stifled by a place or its community because I just don’t stay long enough for it to rub that way—-excluding my high school years. Public high school in a West Virginia small town is absolutely crippling for anyone with a brain and dreams, and I do not wish that disservice upon anyone. You can quote me on that one, kids.

 

To state the obvious, Plymouth has become a home for me because I have invested in it. Shepherdstown became a home for me because I invested in it. Little ol’ Hedgesville, West Virginia never felt that way because I was bitter towards it. I think an open mind helps the homemaking, maybe.

 

There are dozens of cliches that work to define the idea of home as a feeling, a state of mind, etc. What I want to offer you fine folk are two quotes that have been dancing around my head this week:

 

“When I look at you, I’m home.”

 

People are not dwelling places but their hearts are. There are individuals I’ve been privileged with meeting in these past 6 months of my life on the road (I consider the beginning of my adventures to be July when I left for sweet ol’ Wyo) have taken me in, shared their families, and given me so much love I hardly know what to do with it. They bring me back to myself and keep me going, and for that I am blessed.

 

  “Home is wherever I’m with you.”

 

Lyrics from a favorite song, my best friend and I cling to this because she and I are both always on the move, whether it be her summers in the South or middle of nowhere WV or my time away in England. We cling to this because we have had to forge a space of our own somewhere in the airwaves to call home—-somewhere between skype calls and texts and letters, we have created a world that we can both be in together. Our little time in the same latitude is precious and it has made us stronger. I look forward to the day both of our suitcases are unpacked in the same town.

 

            So, I continue to think of home because I will be there soon. 

 

At one of them, anyway.

 

Going back will be both a metric of the passage of time and of my own growth. I think of the cornfield by my house and how that’s changed in obvious ways with the seasons, and how the last time I sat on my back porch it was still summer, with crickets and sweet tea and all the rest. Now there’s a half-foot of snow and counting—the landscape has changed. No permanency with the Earth.

 

You should know though, reader, even at home I won’t be settled too long. Word has it I may be in the South, or in New York for a few days. Never stop moving. There’s too much world to see. So much life.

 

I leave you all thinking of home and whatever that means to you, with a few words imparted on me by someone I’d met at bar a few nights ago. He walked up to me, took me by the shoulders, and in his drunk wisdom almost shouted, ”I am so excited about living!”

 

Me too, man. Me too.

 

 

If you would like to see your blog featured on The Picket’s website (as well as in the print edition) send an email to picketmanaging@gmail.com to get the process started. We welcome any and all current and former students who are interested!