Home Is Where Your Stuff Is?

By Rosanna Trestman

Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about home.
In Norfolk, For Sale signs seem to be everywhere. I wonder where these people are going. Are they returning home? Are they making a new home elsewhere? How long does it take before it feels like home?
Is home a physical shelter for you and your belongings, embellished with the souvenirs of your life and decorated with your personal touch?
If you live with others, home becomes a collaborative project with a shared identity. No matter how populated, home is an extension of yourself and its definition can widen and widen as you develop a commonality and kinship with a larger group. From individual dwelling to town you live in, to the country of your birth, they all construe home, itís just a matter of scale.
But let’s stay with Norfolk, our Hometown.
In Veronica Burns’s article “The Future of Norfolk,” on this page, we learn of a workshop led by a town planning consultant, wherein representatives of several town commissions and other parties actively involved in the operation and infrastructure of Norfolk met to brainstorm on ideas for our townís future. This will be followed by a town-wide meeting this month where everyone will have the opportunity to get in on the design process.
This is not a hypothetical exercise. The state mandates that Norfolk write a new town plan by the year 2010. And we get to do that!
Here’s an opportunity to collectively refurbish our home. We can fix what’s broken, maintain what works, fulfill current plans for improvements, and build-in systems that anticipate the future.
This blueprint will address not only what we want to encourage, but what we don’t. Pro or con, Yale Farm was a wake-up call. We were totally caught unawares because the town as an entity hadn’t had this discussion in recent years (and put teeth behind it). Times have changed from a decade ago. Now, with hindsight, we know to draw up guidelines for, to put it simply, how much we will allow our town to change. The idea is to move gracefully to the future, not scramble to protect the past.
Ideas tossed out at the meeting are exciting, the potential is palpable. There’s an absence of negativity. There is much to be optimistic about when one realizes the empowerment of making a difference, not just as an individual, not only in discrete committee sessions, but as a unity charged with working toward the betterment of our communal dwelling.
Is home where the heart is? I think so.