Notes

Finding Home Crisp evenings would bring children’s laughter. The giggling underneath the trees, screaming when we were running around being chased by who was “it”. It would be those fall nights, right at dusk. We would gather around my mailbox, and decide who would be “it” first, and then count off. Lyrically the numbers were spoken. As transient as they were, it brought adrenaline to our hearts. “Got to find a good spot close.” “We got to find a good spot close.” The smell of pine and sagebrush were stained on our clothed from hiding around the area. It was the only time everyone got together, put aside their differences, and got along. We would sit there by the street lights some nights, tired from all the chasing and chaos. Coupled with



Every time she experiences change, she practices the tradition of creating home. However, she is not the only in the memoir who does. Her mother does as well, within the poem “Ohio Behind Us”, Woodson illustrates her mother’s own struggle of understanding where she feels at home. “When we ask, she tells us this is where she used to belong but her sister, Carolina, out aunt Kay has moved to the North, her brother Odell is dead now, and her baby brother, Robert, says he’s almost saved enough money to follow Caroline to New York City. Maybe I should go there, too, my mother says. Everyone else, she says, has a new place to be now.” (Woodson pg. 46) Jacqueline Woodsons’ mother seems to have no longer felt that feeling of comfort in South Carolina where she grew up. Over time she realized that the feeling of home, isn 't always where you were born, or where you used to belong. Woodson herself remembers the first time she understood that feeling, the first time she created home. Within the poem “The Blanket”, Jacqueline Woodson describes home as a feeling rather than a place. “So the first time my mother goes to New York City we don’t know how to be sad, the weight of our grandparents’ love like a blanket with us beneath it, safe and warm.” (Woodson pgs. 78-79) Woodson speaks of how the love she feels from her grandparents is home to her. After she had moved from Ohio to South Carolina as a child, she didn 't know that home wasn 't just a place of material, it is that feel of a safety and comfort. The soft and warm blanket, being made by love from others. That is what make this tradition so important to the memoir, each time Woodson moves, she struggles with re-discovering what she learned as a child. Such as in the poem, “Halfway Home #1”, “Right now, our mother says, we’re only halfway home. And I imagine her standing in the middle of a road, her arms out