Home is where the heart is--maybe and maybe not.

I am now home in Rhode Island, for nearly 3 weeks, after a month-long adventure in Austria. While I anticipated leaving for my trip, I was also happy to return. There is a comfort to returning to the routine, at least the one that I am lucky enough to have: familiar bed and bathroom, household patterns such as feeding and walking the dog, sharing coffee in the morning—lattes from Reed’s machine—and evening meals on the porch.

Summer is a lovely season here. Life along Narraganset bay is idyllic—we frequently remind ourselves how lucky we are. We watch the sunrise over the bay or the light come each morning, and these days it is slowly creeping to the south. The days remain long, and our summer friends include the osprey who are fishing and raising their young, and the cormorants who dive and then dry their wings—holding them out wide, away from the body, looking like the letter “w” or a dark cross.

When the tide is high and the water calm, I pull a kayak across the grass, launch on the shore 10 yards away, and paddle a mile to the Old Mill Creek estuary—yes there was mill there over a century ago. If the tide is low, it is too shallow to enter and the egrets, herons and shore birds hunt in the sand and exposed mud at the shoreline. When the tide is high, I can paddle in for a mile or more. Yesterday I saw a mallard with three or four chicks—rather late in the season for such a young brood. The day before I floated over a horseshoe crab—also out of season, they should be in the ocean’s depths this time of year.

We and our fellow critters are learning a new normal with the thermometer reaching new highs and the forest fires burning in Canada and Europe. We learn to cope with thinking differently.

Classes have started in the Gateways program, a Masters at Brown for students who want to apply to medical school and need to improve their study skills, gain additional health care and research experiences, and beef up their resumes. This month we trained students to interview patients (compassion and eye contact are as important as open questions and allowing patients to share their stories). Students learn to take vitals (blood pressure, pulse, and respirations), listen to hearts and lungs. Language matters. “Tell me about your living situation is” better than “do you live in an apartment or house?” A patient is unhoused or without housing instead of homeless.

In a Bedouin community in the West Bank, one of the Brown students who is working on a paper with a team of Hebron and Brown medical students, drops off our Zoom call because the IDF had arrived. The Israel Defense Force has been seizing the homes (tents) of the local Bedouins to create a new settlement for Zionists. The definition of home in this part of the world is complicated. Different populations have differing definitions. The land your family occupied for centuries until your grandparents and great grandparents were forced off during the Nakba in 1948. The land you were promised in the Old Testament.  Or in the case of the semi-nomadic Bedouin community, your most recent home, where you currently graze your goats and sheep, because you were forced out of the Negev in 1948.

In San Diego, my sister and staff from her clinic came to the rescue of their local fruit vendor, with a cart on the corner, when ICE identifies the vendor as an “illegal resident.” Where is the home of this gentleman? The country he left to make a better living in San Diego? Or the community where he sells his fruit and is being forced to evacuate?

My sisters and I have engaged the city of Kettering to turn some of the farmland we grew up on, the “home” acreage, into green space to honor my parents. While none of us live on that land, two live in nearby. While the acreage isn’t home now, we all have fond memories from childhood. Helping my dad repair fences, cutting and burning weeds, playing in the creek, and riding horses at full gallop across the pasture and along the fields.

While home may not be where the heart is, we all need to find a safe resting place for our hearts.