I spent a zillion hours of my childhood traversing I-81 from Pennsylvania to Tennessee and back again. I found myself on this familiar route, the tallest section of Virginia on a map, watching the spiraled haybales race by. My thoughts wandered to my great grandparents’ tiny brick ranch nestled somewhere nearby in those endless, rolling hills of Staunton, Virginia. We’d stop at their farm to stretch our legs and have a snack. I vividly recall their Regency Blue bathroom: floor tile, wall tile, bathtub, toilet and console sink, of course! Because of our ages, the ages of my great-grandparents, and the fact that we rarely saw them made the stop feel like an obligation for my sister and me. But here I was, feeling like this place was a part of me.
That feeling of quasi-homecoming got me thinking about my grandfather who left the farm at seventeen and boarded the USS Idaho bound for the South Pacific. He watched from his ship as the flag was raised at Iwo Jima. How desperate was he for the very scene unfolding around me?
The exploding field of epigenetics paired with meticulous records from the Dutch Hongarwinter, the Holocaust survivors and descendants, and other unspeakable tragedies tell us that the effects of trauma are passed down between generations. What about the feeling of Home? Does my body recognize the place my grandfather longed for during the most challenging time of his life?
One day, while wearing my Speech Language Pathologist hat, I was discussing childhood language acquisition with an Iraqi mother. In what I thought was a slip of the tongue I called Arabic her “heart language”. I corrected myself to say “native language” but she said “heart language” was a better translation. Today, Heart Language seems like the perfect phrase as I reflect on how I can feel deeply connected to an ancestral place despite never living there myself.
How does this relate to interior design? It’s simple. Home runs through our veins.