Most of the time, my sense of home emerges from the company I keep. But I feel a place-based homecoming when I return to my maternal grandparents’ house in Worthington, Massachusetts, a rural hill town with just over a thousand residents. The ritual of returning to our family home and the surrounding land floods me with a feeling of eternal love that I have yet to replicate in any other part of my life. This love transcends being in the company of others and resides in private communion with the natural world and the experiences and memories that seep into the spaces we call home. For me, this is like no other place on Earth and swaddles me in how it smells —the grass, the driveway, the cellar air. I have learned the deepest love and gratitude from this place I call home. It is steadfast and forgiving, and being in this place is the closest I’ve ever come to simply being me and truly being seen. Though invisible to the eye, I am tethered to this place and it to me. We are bound by air, dirt, sound, and sunlight. I hear it calling from thousands of miles away when I'm gone. It sounds like a whisper, beckoning for me to come home. 

 

Coming home includes returning to the abandoned barns, cars, and forest dump sites I now call wastescapes. These sites are full of moldering debris the generations before me have left behind. My ancestral waste lingers throughout the town. Some of the dump sites can be seen from the roadside, while others are dispersed throughout the backwoods, wasting behind the cover of trees as they slowly sink back into the earth. Reconciling with these wastescapes and their histories is a strange endeavor, made stranger by the timing. I began returning to these places and their debris as I attempted an emergence from a pandemic (that is very much ongoing).  It is like navigating in the pitch black of night, like tiptoeing on the edge of excitement and fear. It's an exercise in recalibrating and beginning again. It's also the practice of conscious adaptation. Stepping into these wastescapes is like entering my own body, as if somehow swallowing myself whole were possible. They ignite a longed-for kind of heartache inside of me. They feel like the undercurrent of my belonging. They hold some of the most poignant memories of my childhood, memories that are made beautiful by the sadness and suffering accompanying their joy. Creating an art practice inside them means wrestling with mysterious moods and trying to decipher which stories are memories of past events, which came from dreams, and whether or not there is a difference once they’re entangled in the narrative unfolding in this now-present moment in time. 

 

Being in my grandparents' house evokes a similar feeling. Opening doors and exploring rooms, photo albums, cupboards, and drawers is like opening a treasure box. The hallways and the stairs creak in the same spots and I come alive in the safety of their familiarity, but like the sting of numb feet to hot water, they also awaken dormant memories and open old wounds. Memories are ever-changing, evolving beside us even when the shape of the landscape, or the room, and objects that hold their histories appear unaltered. In the wake of these subtle shifts, I find myself tripping over ancestral spirits and trying to puzzle together the untold pieces of my family history. 

 

I sit at the dining room table, listening to my grandmother talk about her dreams and the visitors she encountered throughout the night. We both experience hypnagogic hallucinations, which are false perceptions of objects or events that occur during the transition between waking and sleeping. While this mental phenomena only occurs as a waning state of consciousness, these vivid dreamlike experiences feel like real visual, auditory, tactile, or kinesthetic perceptions, and sharing them has become part of the fabric of our relationship. She describes a lady with a red pocketbook, and we wonder who she could be. Do we know her, is she alive, or is she just a ghost? We also like to gather in the living room to watch the 8mm film I found in their basement. I enjoy listening to my grandfather reminisce about the past and tell stories about his childhood. Watching it also feels like a dream. The films are linear in that we can track the passing of time–the seasons are constantly changing, and people are aging–but the story is still fragmented. It’s Christmas over and over again, unrecognizable faces appear, and the scenes come and go in a blur. Later, I watch the film repeatedly on my own, and my mind drifts in a hundred different directions. As my mother and her siblings flutter across the projection on the wall, my gaze softens, and I begin to wonder why no film or pictures of my Dad or Aunt as newborns exists. I also wonder why they were born in different states, but unlike my mother’s parents, my paternal grandmother was not a storyteller and always changed the subject when this question was asked. 

 

Rousing dormant memories is a bittersweet task, but it also reminds me of the pleasure of returning to and reexamining things I thought I knew. Attending to these places and engaging in a creative process that centers my relationship to where I grew up also unearths questions about a lineage steeped in colonialism. It's no secret that our colonial roots feed our industrial, corporate, and technology-driven lives and perpetuate a primary individualistic culture that drives us to compete among ourselves and the natural world. This way of life keeps us from bonding with one another, and we have become so comfortable in this disjointed way of being that we have lowered our collective tolerance for togetherness. Even I fall prey to the lure of loneliness and isolation, and I believe that’s why I’ve become so adamant about my seasonal homecoming. We cannot separate our histories from our creative endeavors, and returning to this place helps me unpack these complex paradoxes and reconcile with a settlers' sense of belonging. 

 

After completing the wastescapes project, I continued traveling home to work on the Human Erratics and Old Post Road films. But the tick-borne illnesses I carry began stifling my bodily autonomy, and my sense of self was withering away, too. The question, "Who am I?" took center stage. Perhaps, above all, that is what fueled my interest in my ancestry, and maybe recreating dreams and memories alongside the scenes from our family’s home videos was some strange attempt to answer this question, to reclaim my body and my sense of self. 

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Several years passed, and as the film projects progressed, family secrets began to surface. It was revealed that some of the stories and histories I thought I knew were fiction. Suddenly, my ancestral identity began unraveling just as fast as my own. The lines between fact, fiction, dream, and memory really were as blurred as I’d experienced them. Lineage is far from linear, and secrets aren't usually inscribed in the family narratives. A few weeks after my paternal grandmother's passing, her best friend revealed that both my father and my aunt had been adopted. Then, several months later, my maternal grandfather shared with several members of our family that his father was, in fact, not his biological father. His biological father was someone we had been persuaded to believe was a more distant relative. Despite the shock of it all, this unraveling was welcome. I wasn't sad or angry, in fact, I was relieved. I was even a little entranced by it all. I started referring to my family histories as ancestral mythologies, and somehow, I no longer needed to answer the loaded question of who I was, and it fell away just as swiftly as it had come. 

Once the filming and editing were done and we began planning how to arrange the work in the gallery, my dear friend and collaborator Ellie came to me with a book called World of Wonders by Aimee Nezhukumatahil. In it, she marked page 138, the chapter called Red-Spotted Newt, Notophthalmus Viridescents. I knew immediately why she had wanted me to read it. I love red-spotted newts, which are commonly found in the woods of Western Massachusetts. As a young girl, I would go out after the rain to look for them with my sister and cousins. My memory of this ritual is so strong, and we were so captivated by those tiny creatures that when we were deciding which memories to include in the film's final cut, I insisted that these sweet little salamanders be included. I didn’t think very hard about why I loved them or the fact that I didn't know that much about them, but as I read the chapter about the red-spotted newt, my connection to these creatures came into focus. This newt, known as an eft during the early stages of its life, is one of the only amphibians that carries a ferromagnetic mineral, which allows them to align with Earth’s electromagnetic field. This, alongside their ability to memorize sun and starlight patterns, enables them to navigate back to their home pond, no matter how far they stray. 

 

I do not possess the capacity to memorize sun or starlight patterns, nor do I have ferromagnetic minerals flowing through my bloodstream, but my own homing instincts allow me to feel a kinship with the young efts. I know that most viewers won’t give the little red salamander that appears in Old Post Road a second thought, and that’s okay. Learning more about the efts crystallized my own understanding of my work. It allowed me to stop searching for answers and instead understand my homecoming (and the work I made as part of it) as a kind of kinkeeping–albeit a messy kind of kinkeeping–one that allows for adaptation and change, knowing that one day the story will shift again. Even some newts will have to spend years searching for a new pond to call home once they reach adulthood. 

 

Like the earth, the landscape of our body is an ever-shifting topology. We can explore it, map it, and even learn from it. But none of it is permanent. We fall ill, recover, age, get injured, and the cycle goes on and on. Our landscape shifts, and we have to search for a new pond. We resolve to begin again because we cannot control the shifting, and in the end, we cannot fully master our autonomy either. The only thing we can control is what we choose to attend to. So, I no longer seek an identity that is tethered to certainty or even a concrete type of knowing. Instead, I attend to my ever-shifting self. I listen to my body and to my gut, and I follow my intuitions, curiosities, and desires. I give myself permission to feel the ebb and flow of my body's healing and decay. I remind myself that it’s all a labor of love. And when the tide carries me back out into the unknown, I trust that, somehow, I will find my way back home.

 

Click here to view the wastescapes images and read the accompanying journal entries

Click here to watch the Human Erratics film

Click here to watch the Old Post Road film

Click here to watch the two five-minute ancestral mythologies films

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film still by Tori Lawrence