There's No Place Like Home

Seville Home is proud to serve as the presenting sponsor of Kansas City Ballet's production of The Wizard of Oz, and I'll admit the announcement did something unexpected. It put a lump in my throat.

When I was a little kid, The Wizard of Oz came on television once a year, and watching it was a tradition in our house. Same couch, same flying monkeys I pretended not to be scared of, same private certainty that I was Dorothy. And every year, the same ending: Dorothy closing her eyes, clicking her heels, and saying the line everyone on earth can finish.

Seeing myself in her was not much of a stretch. My grandparents lived on a farm, and I stayed with them so often as a child that they practically raised me. Kansas never felt like a place in a movie to me. It felt like my grandma's house.

There's no place like home.

I've carried that line my whole life. The line never changed. I did.

Home had a yellow kitchen

Wood stained reddish brown, with a white door and white windows. Peonies crowded the flower beds, the air smelled like hay, and there were horses and cattle at the fence. Inside was a yellow kitchen that always smelled like something cooking in a black iron skillet.

The afternoon light came through sheer peach curtains that I loved without knowing why. Her ceramic cats hid all through the house, life-size, waiting like Easter eggs. Finding one never stopped feeling like luck.

For most of my life, if you had asked me what home meant, I would have described that house.

I would have been describing the wrong thing.

Home was the person inside it. The one person whose presence made the world feel less sharp. The person you did not have to explain yourself to. The person whose voice could settle something in you that no room ever could.

And when that person is gone, home becomes difficult to describe. The house may still be standing. The furniture may be exactly where it was. The same doors open, and the same clock marks the hours. But something has left that cannot be replaced by anything beautiful.

You begin to understand that what made the room warm was not the light. It was them. What made the table matter was not what sat on it. It was that they were there. What made you feel safe was not the lock on the door. It was knowing that somewhere inside, they were waiting for you.

The cruelty of missing someone is that you do not only miss the person. You miss the version of the world that existed when they were in it. You miss who you were when you could still call them. You miss the small things you did not know to treasure, and the ordinary days that seemed endless until they ended.

And sometimes, in the quietest moments, you still feel yourself reaching for them. Not because you have forgotten, but because some part of you still believes home is where they are.

Home was never the farmhouse

We hear "there's no place like home" and think of houses. Of Kansas. Of a farmhouse and a patch of land.

But Dorothy did not spend all of Oz dreaming about walls, a bed, or a fence line. Home was Auntie Em. She wanted to get back to the person whose love had made those things mean something.

I understood that before I could have explained it, because my Auntie Em was my grandma. When I heard "there's no place like home," it was her house I saw. And I knew exactly why Dorothy turned back the moment the fortune teller said Auntie Em had put a hand over her heart and dropped down on her bed. If someone had told me that about my grandma, I would have run home too. Storm or no storm.

Dorothy found wonder in Oz. She found color, adventure, friendship, power, and proof that she was braver than she knew. None of it could replace Auntie Em.

We are not so different. We travel far. We build beautiful lives. We become more capable, more independent, more impressive. And still, some part of us is always trying to return to the person who first made us feel that we belonged somewhere.

Then one day, that person may no longer be waiting at the door. The rooms can look the same. The road can still lead back. But home has changed.

I think that's why the line aches more as we grow older. Dorothy was not really asking to return to Kansas. She was asking to return to a time when Auntie Em was there. A time when love was ordinary enough to be taken for granted.

"There's no place like home." And beneath that line is the truth no one says out loud: there is no one like Auntie Em. Once she is gone, clicking your heels cannot bring that version of home back.

It took sponsoring a ballet for me to put words to something I've felt for a long time. Sometimes the longing for home is really a longing for a person. The one who made home, home.

For me, it was always my grandma.

At Seville Home we say that home is where life is lived well, and I mean that more personally than it may sound. I will never claim a sofa or a table can give anyone what she gave me. But the rooms we make together are where the people we love happen to us. The ordinary Tuesday dinners. The voice from the kitchen. The person waiting inside.

So build the room. Set the table. And treasure the ordinary days while the person who makes it home is still in them.

We're honored to help Kansas City Ballet bring Dorothy's story to the stage, here in Kansas, where her heart was pointed all along. If you go, and I hope you do, listen for the line you already know by heart.

It means more than a house. It always did.

For my grandma.