The Road to One’s Roots Can Be Rocky

If only going home again were as simple as clicking your heels together. Then again, there are those among us with little desire to return to a place that offered neither refuge nor happy memories.

Home, it turns out, can be as difficult a concept to explain as the notion of the “good old days.” Both are ephemeral, always changing, depending on point of view or station in life.

Whether home is a place that embodies the warm memories of a childhood filled with comfort and love, or a nightmare one would rather forget, there is no question that the key to discovering its meaning lies in looking back--examining the past to find its significance to the present.

Now, three new books look at the meaning of home.

In one of them, 20 writers explore their memories and present a panorama of experience. A second book traces the history of one house and the people who lived there. A third details a Thoreau-like experience of living in the wilderness.

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In her introduction to “A Place Called Home: 20 Writing Women Remember” (St. Martins), editor Mickey Pearlman says that many of the contributors told her that writing about home brought back wrenching memories, some of which had been buried for a long time. This diverse collection of essays is, indeed, powerful. You can almost hear the writers chuckle or sob as they search for the precise image to portray their feelings. For some, these deeply personal revelations evoke recollections of anti-Semitism, racism, unloving parents, loneliness and loss. Others remember their first child or the hopes and dreams that were carved out in their first home.

Not surprisingly, books play an intricate part of what constitutes home for most of these writers. Whether it’s a mini-library in Chicago, a treehouse lined with books in Connecticut or a reading porch in Martha’s Vineyard, these women recall writing rooms and reading rooms where they could escape and where their words built many landscapes and dreams.

One of the better essays is Erica Jong’s “Coming Home to Connecticut.” Her home is designed with a writing room on stilts--a treehouse connected to the main house by a raised breezeway. It is lined with shelves that contain all her books in foreign editions.

“This is where I heal and dream,” Jong writes. As a child, she says, you never really appreciate home. As a young adult, home is the place you want to leave as soon as possible for new adventures. Only in midlife, Jong writes, “does home beckon seductively again, inviting you to pleasures running away can never supply.”

Dani Shapiro recalls a painful childhood in her essay “New Jersey, 1963.”

“It was, I suppose, a piece of bad luck that my parents bought a home in a neighborhood where Jews weren’t welcome,” Shapiro writes. Those who didn’t want Jews in the neighborhood managed to get their message across by setting fire to her front lawn or throwing eggs at her porch. She lived in a house protected by three alarm systems. But it didn’t block out the shouts of “Dirty Jews” in the night.

Also recalling the wrath of prejudice is Sylvia A. Watanabe. In “Knowing Your Place,” Watanabe says, she has come to think of home “as where I am not. As a place I’ve just left or a place where I have not yet arrived.” She recalls memories she would like to discard: The swastika on the carport wall, finding dog excrement smeared on the front stoop. Or the hurtful slurs spewed at her as she walked home from work.

In “Looking for Home,” Mary Morris tells us about a homeless man who has rung her doorbell for the past year or two in Brooklyn. Darrell regales her with delusional tales of woe. And she feels obligated to assist him with dinner and money and odd jobs. Like all good storytellers, Morris says, Darrell is searching for home. His homelessness serves as a jumping-off point for her to recount her own wandering nature. From her childhood in the Midwest to an apartment in Paris, Morris has traveled the world over and has lived in many places. “I think I will never stop somewhere and say this is my home. This is where I belong.”

Meanwhile across the continent in Malibu, Melinda Worth Popham says it was not until her friend’s house burned to the ground that she grasped what it meant to lose your actual home. When her marriage of 24 years broke apart, she too felt displaced. Through a firestorm or a failed marriage, these friends were victims of burnout. In “Malibu DPs,” she relates finding her new home complete with built-in bookcases, pine floors and a fenced yard for the dog. Its address even matched her son’s birth date. She quotes W. Somerset Maugham: “Sometimes a man hits upon a place to which he mysteriously feels that he belongs. . . . Here at last he finds rest.”

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None of these writers’ essays have delved into the actual history of the dwellings that they describe. James Morgan takes the house itself as a subject in his unique book “If These Walls Had Ears: The Biography of a House” (Warner Books).

He traces the history of one house built in 1923 at 501 Holly St. in Little Rock, Ark., and the eight families who lived in it over 72 years. Anyone who has ever owned a home has probably wondered about the people who inhabited the place before them and the lives they led.

“A house creaks under the weight of its secrets,” Morgan writes.

Morgan not only recounts the dramas of each family, he extends his research to the dwelling, telling us how it changed over the years. Whether it was adding a second story or removing a wall, Morgan seems to have discovered each stage of the house’s metamorphosis.

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In the tradition of some of our best nature writers, Beth Powning has forged a life in the wilderness in Canada. “Home: Chronicle of a North Country Life” (Stewart, Tabori & Chang, illustrated with striking color photographs) is a memoir of Powning’s relationship with her land more than the dwelling she occupies.

When she was 21, Powning and her husband decided to leave their home in New England, where her family had had roots for 200 years, because she saw farms supplanted for shopping malls and trees toppled for parking lots. The couple packed only the necessities and made their way to an abandoned farmhouse in a secluded corner of Canada. It is here that they have spent 25 years.

“Home. You have to weave it thread by thread,” Powning writes. In the beginning, they had no radio. The phone could be used only to call out. They lived on the edge of what they thought was wilderness.

Powning documents the changes in the landscape, the farm, and the inner changes she and her husband experienced in the place that they have chosen to live. Powning captures the punishing and healing spirit of nature, the comfort of trees, the soothing sounds of the river, the beauty of wild plants and wildlife.

“We wanted to know, firsthand, the power that moves the stars.”