Whatever happened to 'Home'?

I noticed something disturbing as I was driving through my local city’s ‘posh’ shopping area after not having gotten over there in awhile. More stuff. More shops, more stores, more ‘specialty food’ sellers, more restaurants. And they’re all full of people. They’re all full every time and any time I go.

People can’t seem to stay in their own homes any more. Their pinnacle of living arrangement is the $400,000+ home in the suburbs where they can’t put up a clothes line and their postbox must conform to specs. They have hundreds more square feet than a couple with max 2 kids (one boy and one girl!) could possibly ever use – even the cat has it’s own room – and they are never home.

Both parents work to afford the clotheslines-are-gauche lifestyle, they shop almost every day, they eat out most nights. At the week-end they hit the mall (again), see a film, shop some more, eat out again. Any extra time is spent ‘driving the kids to (fill in the blank: party, lesson, sport)’. Nobody’s kids ever just play on a playground anymore – in fact playgrounds are being banned as ‘hazardous’. Nobody’s kids just ride bikes all afternoon or get up an impromtu game of basketball before supper. They participate in sports. They have to have special clothes and equipment purchased for and be driven to organized, paid for, athletic events or classes: soccer, baseball, gymnastics, swimming.

One would think that in this age where the telly goes on the instant people get home (or get up in the morning) and blares all day, where almost everyone has internet access, where there’s too many video games to play in one lifetime … folks would be sufficiently entertained and wouldn’t strive so desperately to leave their homes.

And what’s up with going on holiday? I don’t mean an annual (or even twice yearly) get away. I mean the folks who are away on holiday all the time as if they feel itchy in their own houses, as if their normal lives are so unsatisfactory that they have to purge them at some exotic location.

So your job is tedius or boring or high-pressure? Why do you work there? To afford the house you only sleep in? To afford to run off to Mexico or the carribbean and snatch a few days of relaxation before you have to run back to the job you hate so that you can make enough money to vacation? Is anyone else seeing the hamster-on-the-wheel similarity here?

Perhaps it’s just me. Perhaps I’m the original homebody. Perhaps it’s that I’m a fixer-uper who lives in a 120 year old house on a farm. If I listed all the things that needed doing, from painting the pump house to caulking the shower to puttting up miles of fence, the list would be as long as I am tall.

Or maybe I’m just comfortable in my own familiar surroundings and with my own people. I’m quite content in my own home. Like George Carlin I like my Stuff. I enjoy just talking with my Darling Hubby or playing idly with the kids if I get a second. I can sit on a warm, rainy summer day with the back door open and just stare out into the woods.

I’m not knocking folks who are never at home - they choose that lifestyle - I’m just saying that I don’t understand it.

Perhaps this is why people put such huge stock in the holidays. It’s the only time that the family is actually in the house, doing things with each other, making family-at-home memories.

One or two days a year.

Does anyone else find this sad?