her intensity, her conviction that she has lived a good lifenand a productive one, and that.her one wish now, that keenndesire that keeps the fires of her life burning, is that hernheritage of crafts and wisdom and piety and goodness benpassed on directly by her, now to great-grandchildren.nLater we pay a visit to the outdoor “cellar,” a sunkennstone structure, always cool, and Grandma shows Heidinwhere we used to “put up” catsup and sauerkraut andnsausage in the summer, done less frequently now in thisncellar though they are not entirely forgotten, and have notnbeen displaced totally by supermarket packages and plasticizednfare. We return to the kitchen — this is the ritual —nand Grandma delivers her homilies. She moved into thisnmode of direct “telling” when the clan grew older and a fewnwent away and visits by some came less often. The wisdomnthat is hers, the symbols and values and rules that animatenher life and make it make “sense,” now must be impartedndirectly in gentle but firm perorations.nOnce, when the family gathered ’round every Sunday,nwhen there were fewer and less far-flung members. Grandmandidn’t need to rely on homilies. Her principles werenimbedded in her daily activities. Her commitment to familynhonor, decency, sharing, helping one’s neighbor, tending tonthe sick and needy, and honest hard work was visible for allnto witness. But now she uses little stories and parables tonimpart these values to those family members who rarelynwitness them “in action,” including a great-granddaughternfrom “the East.” Grandma tells the story of the devastatingnflu pandemic of 1919 (“I think it was, or 1920, right innthere”) when she went off, placing herself in peril, to nursensome neighbors. One whole family was down with the flu.nTwo children and the mother died. Grandma tended to thensick and the dying and buried the dead. She ends this tale ofntragedy and heroism with simple words, “To have a friendnyou have to be one. So that’s the way it is.” Heidi and I nodnand say, “Yes Grandma, that’s right.” And it is right.nLate afternoon now. Time for tea and “Handy SelfnGake” and then we depart. Grandma worries if people stayntoo late; night driving concerns her. All these years and she’snscarcely reconciled to the automobile. As for airplanes,n”You’d never get me in one of those things. Never. Rightnhere I’m gonna stay. Nobody will ever get me out of thisnplace.” Nobody will. Who would dare to try?nHome is a beloved landscape located in a historic timenand space and in inner space. Homelessness is annabsence, a fissure, where a rich and particular world ought tonbe. Intimate spaces, intimate places, my corner of the world.nHome is the particular domain of intimacy, a landscape innwhich rich emotion, “psychic weight,” is dominant. Yetnhome implodes: images of home are carried with us, out intona world we experience as alien or feel more or less at homenin. Countries become homelands. Nations are conceived asnlarge and frequently warring families. The universe itselfnmay take on a fierce and alien hue — cosmic homelessness,nblack holes in space compressing, entrapping, making thingsndisappear. Or the sense of an ordered world, a cosmicnmeaningfulness may predominate because God, in thenwords of Albert Einstein, “does not play dice with thenuniverse.”nPerhaps if we understand what it is to be “at home” in anbeloved landscape, concrete and particular, we can understandnintimacy as the content of a particular kind of relationnthat such a landscape makes possible. Gaston Bachelardnmight call this “topoanalysis,” “the systematic psychologicalnstudy of the sites of our intimate lives.” The house, thenimage of home, draws things unto itself; it encloses. Homenboth constrains and “makes possible” — this it has inncommon with other complex cultural forms. Home is annintensely inhabited space. It is the evocative memory of thatnintensity in space that forms the basis of “home” as timenremembered (time past) and as time present (psychic time).nThere is, there must be, something “natural” about thenway in which human beings have, in every culture, everynplace, every time, set about creating homes for themselves:nprotected spaces within which the shape of their face-to-facenrelations could be structured and given form and texture. InnMary Midgeley’s words, the notion of being “at home” isnactually a rather modest idea. “It does not mean having annenvironment that has been especially designed for you. Itnmeans having one where you belong.” And human beingsncannot belong just any place, for human beings start outntheir lives as helpless, dependent creatures who neednprotected spaces and places in order to grow up at all. Thenoriginal image of the “abandoned” child is of a childn”exposed,” left on a hillside to starve, to perish from thenelements, to be eaten by wild animals. A child without anhome, homelessness, exposure, abandonment—the powerfulnthemes and images cluster together. That they do sonspeaks to something very primitive, very deep; it goes to thencore of what it means to be a human person and to have anhuman culture.nHome is specific. Homes speak to, and of, our need fornroots. Uprootedness, like homelessness, signifies the death ofnthe spirit, the travail of the body, the curse of history. Wenrequire the rootedness that the form and idea of homenprovides in order to grow up with a sense of ourselves asnparticular, unique, and worthy beings, and, ideally, to seenothers as our fellows, not enemies, not foes, not that whichnstands in our way and must be destroyed. For the bitterlynhomeless are disruptive; they would destroy that which theyncan feel only as an absence, a negation of self We know thatnit is only through the child’s special relationships to specificnothers (the family, in the home) that he or she can laternidentify with and reach out to others — “enhouse” a widernuniverse, “familiarize” a social space that stretches beyondnthe walls and doors and windows of this house, this home,nthese particular people.nThe home is a work of culture. It is culture — one of thenforms within which culture itself takes shape. How does thisnwork? The home is a particular and specific place; annincubating chamber, a launching pad, at times a prison. Butnit is necessary—as necessary to the creation of a human life,nto the possibility of intimacy as life lived rather thannlonged-for, as the air we breathe. Some people are verynunlucky in their homes. Some homes are battiegroundsnrather than nurturing spaces. But this is the human condition,nto be struggled against in its particular abuses, but nonmore to be lamented as a misfortune than is the fact that thensun fails to shine 24 hours a day. Midgeley writes:nSome people do feel that the proper thing wouldnnnMARCH 1989/17n