Where to call home?

The back of my childhood home, originally uploaded by Kevglobal.

Suw and I know the vague outlines of the kind of house we want. That’s the relative known in this equation, but at the moment, one of the biggest unknowns is where we want to live, where we want to call home.

This is the house that I grew up in, and really it’s one of only two ‘homes’ that I’ve known in my life. I lived here from when I was four until I was in my early 20s. I loved, and still love coming home to this house. It’s set on a 6-acre plot in 40 acres of trees amongst the dairy, cattle and corn farms in northern Illinois. It is an ocean of calm for me conveniently located not far from Chicago, Milwaukee and Madison. It’s far enough from those cities to still be able to see a blanket of stars in the night sky. This isn’t suburbia. This is rural farmland.

To be honest, I’d love to live in the countryside somewhere and travel into the city when I needed to or wanted to. I enjoy cities but as a visitor not a resident. In this century of the city, I probably seem like a throwback, but it’s how I grew up. This house, my home, was a refuge from the stresses of my life when I was young, and I miss having a place like it. A postage stamp-sized flat in the sea of stress that is London hardly seems a substitute.

Suw definitely feels more settled in London than I do. However, she grew up in rural Dorset here in England, and she instantly felt at home in rural Illinois. It seemed like home to her, just more spread out, she said. The one sticking point for her would be the climate. She’s never been there in winter, and winters can be are bone-chillingly cold.

I really wish that the internet rendered geography as irrelevant as the cyber-utopian in me thinks it does. But so much of the business we do is still face-to-face, and neither Suw nor I are in the kind of businesses where we can set up shop and do programming piece work to support ourselves. We are trying to become less geographically dependent, but we’re still quite a way from that goal.

And we are torn. We do enjoy the convenience of the city on some level. We are less than five minutes walk from a gym, two markets and mass transit where we live now. I’m wondering if there might be a happy medium in a small-sized university town or city. The other ‘home’ I had was a group house with two friends in Ann Arbor Michigan. That was fleetingly brief, only a year, but I quickly settled in there. There was good food, wine and culture in a small town with leafy green streets and beautiful old homes. The city has a great farmers market, the famous Zingerman’s deli and a range of ethnic food that is relatively rare in a city of its size in the Midwest of the United States.

This is just the first post of many in which we think out loud about where to call home. In some ways, we’re overwhelmed by choice, we could settle in the UK or the US. The range of options is daunting, and the pull of city and country is just one of the tensions we’ll have to resolve.