A Tale of at Least Two Cities

Well, it's settled. We can't come home -- or at least, not to the home we left in Salem. Despite an insurgence of moss down the driveway and over the front porch, we found out on Friday that a family with a small dog has taken over the place and part of the mortgage. Whew.

Which gives us the chance -- without fire, or foreclosure, or pogrom -- to ask about the meaning of a home. Jesse and I counted this weekend, and figure that we've moved eight times in the last fourteen years, which makes pinpointing "home" somewhat challenging. Our parents have moved around quite a bit as well, house to house and state to state, and there's nothing like an ancestral home either (unless you count Ohio).

So this weekend, we went to visit someone else's ancestral home: the Dunfermline Palace and Abbey in Dunfermline, Scotland, built almost a thousand years ago for Queen/Saint Margaret and her husband. She and a piece of him -- his embalmed heart -- are buried there (no clarification about what exactly happened to the rest of him, I'm afraid), as is Robert the Bruce (the minor bearded character in Braveheart, and despite what Mel Gibson believes, far more important to Scotland's autonomy than William Wallace) and myriad other characters. The palace and the abbey functioned as a joint property for the royals, including Mary Queen of Scots and Lord Darnley, and the church.

They can't go home either, not the least because they are dead but also because there's not much home left. Building began on the site in the 11th century and continued for almost 700 years, but the thing entered its final ruined stage a couple of hundred years ago. On Saturday, after buying tickets and a membership to Historic Scotland from a lovely, persuasive host, Jesse and I walked through the remains of the refectory, the Queen's chambers, the kitchen, the gatehouse, and the monks' dormitory (complete with a charming drawing of monks yawning), the rooms open to the public.

It's hard to tell from the photos, which are mostly from the still-standing nave, but this was a spectacular house. The rooms were huge, with large windows overlooking a small river and wood. The negative? You could run into monks on the way to the loo. The positive? If you're queen, you can apparently say to the architect, "I'm not the one who has to cook, so I don't even want to see the kitchen. Just put it in the basement." There were three stories, with a huge hall on top, and lovely spiral staircases to connect the levels. Cold, desperately cold, but stunning. And considering some of the rocky, damp, tiny hovels monks seemed to frequently inhabit between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, a pretty good gig as religious orders go.

In The World Without Us, author Alan Weisman makes his point in about two pages and then continues to write long enough to have enough pages for a book and Discovery series. Nonetheless, he notes that the buildings that will survive humankind are not the steel temples we've built in the last century, but instead buildings that have already stood the test of time -- buildings like Dunfermline Palace. Though roofless and almost as mossy as our Salem home, you can feel the building's power in the massive stone walls and paved floors -- carved by stonecrafters long gone who left their logos in the stones they carved. Wars for independence, the Reformation, several world wars, conflicts between queens and popes notwithstanding. . . these stones have sat silent and committed, holding up ancient walls and legends.

We got home to discover our modern dwelling less resilient. Dead refrigerator, stinky food. And then I accidentally reset my iPhone settings, deleting all of the photos I have taken since I got the phone, including beautiful pictures of Dunfermline. Thank goodness that, according to Weisman, future societies won't have to put up with these imperfect and ephemeral gadgets. So I am beholden to Jesse and French Wikipedia (did you know there was a French Wiklipedia?) for the photos.

P.S. Brace yourself. Giving me a membership to Historic Scotland is like giving Elton John a knightship and a crazy hat. I'm going to use it.

P.P.S. Nothing like moving 4,500 miles away from your friends and family to make you philosophical. However, this is the lasty extensive musing on homes or home-related topics. Promise.