Finding Home

"Home.  What kinder place could there be on earth, and why did it seem to them all like exile?  Oh, to be passing anonymously through an impersonal landscape!  Oh, not to know every stump and stone, not to remember how the fields of Queen Anne's lace figured in the childish happiness they had offered to their father's hopes, God bless him.
"She had to speak to neighbors in their gardens, to acquaintances she met on the sidewalk.  Strangers in some vast, cold city might notice the grief in her eyes, even remember it for an hour or two as they would a painting or a photograph, but they would not violate her anonymity.  But these good souls would worry about her, mention her, and speculate to one another about her.  Dear God, she saw concern in their eyes, regret...
"That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us.  As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life.  In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought that what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could ever be put at ease, restored.  At home.  But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all."

-from Home by Marilynne Robinson