Ten Childhood Homes

Sometimes “coming home” simply means leaving absentminded reverie behind and coming back to this life

Maurice Sendak, “Where the Wild Things Are”

1. It is remarkable how the search for the lost home is the acute feeling at the center of so many children’s stories. After she is taken from her grandfather’s mountain hut and left at the mansion in Frankfurt, Heidi grows so homesick that she begins to sleepwalk; every night this heartsick little somnambulist opens the door of the mansion she longs to leave and steps outside, in her deep wish to return to her alpine home. As much fun as Max has with the monsters in Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, in the end he still wants to return home and be “where someone loved him best of all.” Even the unwanted Hansel and Gretel, when they are abandoned in the woods, are eager to follow the trail of bread crumbs back to their old home.

2. In the chapter “Dulce Domum” (“Home Sweet Home”) in Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows, Mole is lost in a snowstorm and then smells something: “He stopped dead in his tracks, his nose searching hither and thither in its efforts to recapture the fine filament, the telegraphic current, that had so strongly moved him. . . . Home! That was what they meant, those caressing appeals, those soft touches in the air, those invisible hands pulling and tugging, all one way.”