Light briefly streams through the windows before the autumn sky returns to muted grey. I sit snuggled under the technicolour blanket crocheted with my Nonna when I was a child. Technicolour because we’d used scraps of wool leftover from knitting cardigans and end lots - cheaper, unsaleable stock. I hated the browns. They were so 1970s, but it was the 1970s, and Nonna liked brown.

She taught me to crochet by making granny squares for this blanket. I know she surreptitiously replaced the dodgiest of my squares - which, let’s face it was most of them. Despite its lack of aesthetic cohesion, and my two best (read least dodgy) squares that she included - it’s beautiful and one of my favourite possessions.

This brown blanket, created with my Nonna, reminds me of home, but I’m not sure what that means. I never lived at the house where it was crafted. The feeling is tied to the weeks of weekend visits it took to make it; the time spent together; the passing of knowledge from one generation to another; the bond that developed; the love that was given and received. So I snuggle deeper into the blanket, frayed from 40 years of use. The rough edge of a thread from one of my squares has come loose. I play with it as my mind begins to wander.

I was named after my Nonna. My dad insisted, and tradition dictated it. My mum hated the name, thinking it too harsh. They compromised on Carmelina, a diminutive form of Carmela. But there is really nothing diminutive about me, nor my Nonna for that matter. It’s a strange feeling growing up as a compromise. My family never called me by my name, to them I will always be Melina, Lina, Nina or Neens. Nonna always called me Carmelina. Maybe she had a clearer view of who I was all along. To be honest, I think she was putting her foot down and ensuring her name carried on - an entirely plausible scenario. She was a stubborn and determined woman - I had to get it from somewhere.

It wasn’t until my early twenties that I insisted that the world call me by my name. This is no mean feat in Australia where a four-syllable name was just too difficult to get your tongue around, but I held my ground. To the world, and more importantly to myself, I am Carmelina. I feel more at home in my name than my nicknames, and I won’t compromise that, not anymore.

I continue to play with the frayed brown wool. Oddly wearing my bronzed brown lightweight cardigan. The only brown material I own - apart from this blanket. Black makes up 90% of my wardrobe, so the cardigan doesn’t go with much. I wear it anyway on occasion as I do love the tones. It makes me think of Nonna, although it’s not her style at all. It provided no warmth like her thick hand-knitted cardigans, but she loved the colour. I’m not sure if the black wardrobe is me rebelling against my mum’s hatred of mourning clothes and the loss that they represent or that I’m Melbourne born and bred. Black crows from down south, according to those north of the border. Mayhaps it’s a combination of the two, either way, it stuck.

I have always felt more of a Melburnian than an Australian. This seems an odd thing to say, but it’s true. We have a very different way of being here in Melbourne than in other parts of the country. My time living in Darlinghurst, the most Melbourne of Sydney suburbs along with Newtown, confirmed to me that not all parts of Australia are created equal. Interactions are different, though this could be grossly unfair to Sydney. The cockroaches and mosquitos didn’t help. Sydney was a geographical escape for me at a difficult time. It didn’t feel like home at all. I’m sure if I were to relocate there now, it would feel somewhat like home. Actually, there is one thing stopping that from ever being possible - cockroaches.

Nonna was born in Newburgh, Orange County, NY. Her family emigrated there to escape fascism and the first world war ravaging Italy. They struggled with life in this strange land, returning to Italy a few years later. My American Nonna is no more American than any other Italian Australian, despite the geography of her birth.

My brief stint in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, NY, proved an eye-opener. The differences were staggering and, if I’m honest, somewhat exhausting. It didn’t take long to find my preferred local shops in both Brooklyn and Manhattan. And there was Prospect Park. I would take Prospect Park over Central Park any day. It was the perfect way to decompress after a day in Manhattan, even when it was below freezing and covered in snow. NY didn’t feel like home, which shouldn’t come as a shock to anyone. Yet, I was surprised that the customs and habits of the locals were so foreign to me, given just how much American culture we consume in Australia.

My dad wanted me to visit Newburgh. I didn’t. Ninety-seven years after Nonna’s birth and months after her death, there didn’t seem much point. She was a toddler when they returned to Italy and had no stories of her time there. What would I witness that would have held meaning to a toddler? What meaning would it hold for me?

My American purchases, a frying pan, (unused) candle, seven books and a heavy Calvin Klein woollen coat were memories of my time there. The coat was an extravagance, too thick for Melbourne winters, but so welcomed through New York’s cold seasons. The frying pan purchased because the “fully equipped” kitchen’s pan was small and encrusted. I wasn’t about to leave a frying pan I had purchased behind. I blame it on my migrant upbringing—ditto for the candle. Despite this, I tend not to get attached to things, apart from my ever-expanding book collection. Yes, I suffer from Tsundoku/Bibliomania. I just can’t do digital - books are a sensory thing.

When I packed to return to Melbourne, I felt forlorn, like I was packing up my life, even though I had only been there a few months. I was overwhelmed by a sense of ending things in a place where I didn’t belong. To say I was confused as I packed my suitcases is an understatement. A loose thread against the silver-grey lining of the coat caught my attention as I folded it away. It would have to wait until I returned to Melbourne.

Seeing Nonna’s blanket folded at the end of the bed, on my return to Melbourne, my couch, my kitchen table, my bookshelves (oh my books!) felt like coming home - sort of. It was all familiar, yet I was slightly removed. My family thought I was yearning for NY, but I wasn’t. I was glad to be back. I put it down to jet lag and made the obligatory phone calls to family. We headed to Flinders Street Station to wander the city in an attempt to stay awake and reset to GMT +10. Somehow Melbourne had changed during my absence. Familiarity lurked around every corner and at every stop, but something was just a little bit off everywhere we went.

We returned and unpacked. First load of washing on, frying pan in the kitchen, candle in the lounge, books split between bookshelves and bedside table, toiletries and clothes put away. I pulled out the winter coat - remembering the loose thread I grabbed the scissors to cut it off before hanging it in the wardrobe. These things that held meaning 24 hours before were now just things to be stored. Suitcases away, Nonna’s blanket again caught my eye. I wanted to keep it out, but summer was in full swing - it was time to pack it away.

If the house was the same and Melbourne was the same, I must have changed. I sat on the couch, feeling displaced in my own home. Home was no longer about place, nor was it about things - even my books didn’t hold the same meaning.

My many travels and subsequent returns to the familiar had seemed to progressively erase my feeling of home. It wasn’t detachment, nor about feeling home elsewhere. The meaning that these things, items, people, places held had changed. They were not lessened, just different. I wish I could discuss this with Nonna. She seemed to not have these attachments that so many others have. My Nonno died in World War II a few years after they were married and six months after my father was born. Although she still had her family around her, her life was changed irrevocably.

Being a single mother in a country at war meant life was a struggle. She traded flour and sugar on the black market, sewed clothes for neighbours, and worked as a labourer on farms to feed her family. She did what she had to do to make ends meet. For Nonna, change was the only constant. It’s difficult to attach a sense of home to transient things. The more impermanent they are, the less meaning we assign them. Even where there is some permanence in certain aspects, say place or geography, instability in other areas affects our attachment to the stable parts of our lives. She felt “at home’ in Melbourne - with her family, where the insecurity and instability of her life had been replaced by comfort and consistency. But feeling “at home” isn't at all the same as a sense of home.

I wish I could ask Nonna about her sense of home, I wish we had discussed it when she was alive, but wishing doesn’t make it so. Her pragmatic attitude to life seemed to preclude attachment. In her opinion, you play the cards you’ve been dealt, and she did love to play cards. Missing Nonna’s wisdom, I’ve asked scores of people what constitutes home for them. The responses were, for the most part, predictable. Home is where they grew up, the family home, town, suburb, or where they currently reside. For others, it’s the language of their childhood, their mother tongue or the idiosyncrasies of their early years.

In The Poetics of Space Gaston Bachelard describes our house as our first universe. From there, we can explore the rest of the world, knowing that home is there for us to return to. But what if we view this on a grander scale? Our first universe, as seen through the eyes of a child? It's more than just our house. It's the people, the smells, the food. It's the language, accent and voices. It's the colours, the weather and geography. All the things that are particular to that time and space.

“Home is less about ownership and more about connection and memory some- times being away from home, home doesn’t feel like home anymore. Home is ever changing.”

Kan- Social Commentator, Friend

Is that what I was feeling on my return from New York? The ever-changing nature of home? There is a lot that rings true in what Kan says. Memory plays a huge part in our sense of home, even though it’s selective, even though it’s fallible. Bachelard suggests that memories of home are more poetry than history. We craft “images of intimacy”, which are “imbued with dream values that persist long after the reality has passed. Memory provides us with a sense of home without actually detailing the facts. Home is an emotive response to what we have experienced, whether it’s people, food, places or things. Our connection to those things, once embraced, resides within us more abstractly and emotively than it does in reality. Home can’t be reduced to bricks and mortar, or a person, or items; instead, it’s how those things make us feel. It's our connection to that feeling that gives meaning and provides a sense of home.

“How can secret rooms, rooms that have disappeared become abodes for an unforgettable past?”

Bachelard

Is it any wonder that we put so much stock in the memories and connections of our early years? We have carried them the longest, crafted and honed them to perfection, often until they bear little resemblance to reality. We place them on podiums in the great galleries of our minds and fail to question their value and meaning as we grow and inevitably change. Instead choosing to hold them in awe and regard them with reverence.

“A lot of people refer to the family home. In fact, I still do too out of habit... I can’t identify home without first working out what makes me home-less... I guess home for me... is me... not just ME, nor some metaphysical space within me etc that I meditate and return to...home is me as in the equation. The sum of all my experiences and memories that makes me who I am.”

Keith, Self Confessed Army Rat, Friend

I was thrown by this, but it made sense. For Keith, it turns out, home is within. It travels with him. Home is the sum of Keith. Made up of his memories and experiences and all that has contributed to his life. So what would make him home-less? Losing his sense of self, and issues of old age like dementia and Alzheimer’s. Nonna had dementia, but it didn’t hit until after her 94h birthday. For all but the last 18 months of her life according to Keith’s understanding - she was home. I like to think that’s the case.

I understand how Keith feels. There is part of me that is always home. But I have, at various times in my life, lost my sense of self without suffering those terrible afflictions. Do I feel home-less then? Not quite. I feel displaced. Like I don’t belong. Still, there were always other elements that bring me back to that sense of home. Sometimes it’s people who have been with us our whole lives, sometimes it’s people who have been with us a short while. Time in a relationship, whilst a factor, is not the determinant of how much a person feels like home.

So what is home? Things? Somewhat. Places? More so. People? Yes. And what of memories? Definitely a trigger. In the discussions I have had about home, something was missing. It seems we are always trying to point to an external - person, place, object - because these things speak to who we are. Our sense of home builds our view of our own identity. It positions us in the world and allows us to understand who we are as people.

For me, it's all of these things and yet none of them distinctly. For me, home is about connection. My connection to people, to place, to memories, and yes, sometimes to things. But the most important connection is to myself. As Keith said, home is within ME. I am the weaving together of all of my previous connections and experiences. My understanding of myself is crafted from those things that people generally attribute to home via externalities.

Potentially, Keith and I have just internalised it differently. That’s not to say we are dissociative; quite the opposite. We are both fully engaged and mostly present. The new experiences we have join with the other memories and add to that sense of self. In my experience, when a situation or person doesn’t fit the narrative of who I am, they add to and strengthen my sense of self/home rather than detract from it. That being said, I still have a distinct sense of home, which is separate from myself from time to time.

When I feel less connected to myself or when my sense of self gets blurred, I lean more on my connections to the other. People, places, things and memories take on greater significance at these times. It’s not that they are otherwise unimportant. I just lean on them less for my sense of home when my sense of self is strong. Melbourne’s late autumn chill permeates the room as I cover myself with Nonna’s blanket and tuck the loose thread back into the weave. Home within myself, home under its warmth and the memories it holds.