Reconsidering Home
Author: Comfort Kehinde Egbanubi, winner of the George Buchanan Creative Writing Prize 2024
Home, for me, is humid air and sweaty brows, cramped public buses, relentless noise, spicy soups, my mother’s laughter, my dad’s favourite recliner, loud greetings of “E kaaro o1” as I genuflect frantically to avoid ‘offending’ anyone. Home is the rhythmic sway of Champion (my family’s German Shepherd)’s tail as it wags happily at the sight of me.
Home is the place I left behind last September in search of a better life.
September 2023. I take my first step on Western soil and immediately feel the rush of a cool wind on my face. I am stunned but also pleased at the coolness. Though unfamiliar, it is soothing, and I continue walking into forever in what I hope to be the new chapter of my global citizenship.
***
Stirling, at first, is unexpected in its quiet: the stillness of daytime, the noiseless rustle of leaves, and the graceful movement of swans as they glide across the loch. Many times, I catch myself sitting by the window as I take in the city with great awe. Before long, I find that I am negotiating with myself, even loving the quiet. It helps that I find my days punctuated with the cawing of birds, scampering of squirrels, and the rumbling sound of trains along the tracks.
As the days fade into weeks and months and the beatific absence of flowers in autumn painfully progresses through the dull slumber of winter into, finally, the freshness of spring, I notice something happening to me.
I am, after a lifetime of certainty, reconsidering the meaning of home.
***
Home always was my family, in the house my parents and siblings lived. Home was boisterous and at times chaotic, but it was my home because I’d never known anything else. Yet, I found myself discovering, despite myself, a new Home in the singsong “hiya” of Stirling locals, the warmth of the men and women who offered a welcoming smile when I passed by them on my walk, or the couple who, with concern in their voices, asked if I was alright after I fell off a bike in Cornton.
One day in the hush of contemplation, a thought strikes my mind like a burst of sunlight through parted clouds: I am rediscovering Home. Even better, I am finding that Home can expand beyond the familiar spaces and faces of a lifetime.
Home, I discovered, can be quiet. It can exist in the sights of sprawling hills, chilly highlands, strong winds, and capricious weather. Home can be recreated in the wistful sound of the lad playing the bagpipe in Goosecroft Road on a lazy weekend, or at the sight of the mother walking her cooing son in a stroller along Edzell Drive.
Home is Spring in Stirling, the delicate yellows, whites, reds, pinks, and purples of its flowers, the magic of witnessing history as I walk through the cobbled streets of the old town, radiant displays of the rainbow across the sky after the rain, long days and short nights, rolling hills sitting in the shadow of Scotland’s storied past, and my unexpected community of friends.
Home is evolving, and I am with it.
Fragments of this evolution now slips out of me like the fragrant scent of freshly brewed coffee. Contrary to my previous maniacal obsession with doing, I have taken on Stirling’s calm. I have grown in my appreciation of a walk, sometimes with friends, sometimes with the knowing nod of other hikers for company.
***
They say home is where the heart is, but my heart is split in two. There is the home I have always known and the Home I am now discovering; the home that promises the reassurance of the familiar and the Home that offers exciting newness. One offers a link to my past and the other an oasis for my future.
In truth, I find myself sometimes ambivalent, cautious less I slap permanent labels on places with irreversible finality. I am torn between these windy spaces2 and the piece of myself that’s forever etched in the past.
- E kaaro o: a Yoruba greeting which translates to “good morning”.
- A saying attributed to Sir Alexander Gray.
