Hiraeth is a Welch word without a direct English translation. Roughly translated it means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to or a home that never was.

I dream of places. I dream in places. People and plots are secondary characters to places that linger with me for days. Often, I return to dream places and find comfort in the crooks and crannies, the hills and dales of places I have visited before. While others travel to cities peopled with theaters, restaurants, and bustling sidewalks, I can only think of the places I would travel to, places with craggy mountainsides, meadows of lavender that stretches as far as the eye can see, deep woods with abandoned cottages, and cold streams that polish rocks and babble deliciously.

I suffer from hiraeth. I have never lived in the places I dream of; nor can I return to them except in dream. Still, they haunt me, delight me, sustain me in ways that people often cannot.

Perhaps I have inherited this hiraeth from my father. At the heart of his poetry is a sense of place. The plains, the rivers, the wind and skies are Nebraska–and yet more. Something beyond the literal landscapes of the state or any state, something that never quite was but could be, and perhaps should be. In “After Haying,” my father writes:

After Haying

There were evenings when

the land drew the sky across its pelvis

blue coming softly down

marrying the brown

filling the windbreaks

with the shadows of long songs

Blue coming softly down/marrying the brown/filling the windbreaks/with shadows of long songs. In these lines is the home I cannot return to, the home that perhaps never was. Some may argue that blue skies and brown earth are the common stuff from which most places are made. They will say that you can go home to these places, for they are all around you. But this blue and this brown are uncommonly my father’s. And mine. These long songs are those I hear most clearly as the songs of home. Perhaps others will not understand the hireath here. How it teases those who will see it with the promise of both tangibility and mysticism. How it lives more fully in dreams and poetry.

In Horton Foote’s play, The Trip to Bountiful, he presents an elderly woman who lives in The Sanctuary of Hiraeth. Carrie Watts is confined to a two-bedroom apartment in Houston which she shares with her son and daughter-in-law. Unable to support herself and live independently in her family home in Bountiful, Texas, she fixes breakfast for her son, vacuums and dusts, and–when she cannot sleep most nights–sits in a rocking chair by the window, the night sky and moon the only tangible reminders of the home she yearns for and dreams of seeing once again. She has attempted, and failed, to escape by bus to Bountiful. Each time, her son, Ludie, finds and retrieves her, warning that she must consider her “bad heart” and stay put.

Finally, in a stroke of the best fortune, she makes it to the bus station–undiscovered–buys a ticket, boards the bus, and makes it to a town ten miles from Bountiful, which no longer exists. When the sheriff finds her sleeping on a bench in the bus station, he informs her that her son charged him with keeping her until he can come and take her home. She cries, she cajoles, she begs until the sheriff consents to driving her the ten miles to see her family home in Bountiful.

Her home is but a shell now, but Mrs. Watts sits on the porch and takes in everything that she has only dreamt of in the Houston apartment. When her son finally arrives, she admits that Bountiful and the family home are no longer how he would have remembered them. But she continues:

But the river will be here. The fields. The woods. The smell of the Gulf. That’s what I took my strength from, Ludie. Not from houses, not from people.

In 1985, Foote’s play was made into a feature film starring Geraldine Page as Carrie Watts. As I have watched and re-watched this film, I live vicariously through Page’s performance. Even today, I can hear her voice giving hiraeth a theatrical substance and permanent presence in my all-time favorite characters. Ultimately, Carrie Watts is returned to the two-bedroom apartment where she will live out her remaining days. As she gets into her son’s car, she turns–one last time–to whisper, Goodbye, Bountiful, goodbye.

She knows the homesickness for the home she cannot return to and understands that, in many ways, this was a home that never really was. At least, it never was the home she believed it to be. The two-story home with upstairs bedroom where she and her son stayed, with the fireplace that her father tended, with the garden where she planted and harvested the stuff that sustained all of them. This home has been ravaged by the Gulf winds and salt. It will not last more than a year or two before it will succumb to the elements. Still, she understands that there is something more, something tangible and mystical like the shadows of long songs in the fields, the woods, the smell of the Gulf. 

In her book, The White Album, Joan Didion writes:

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

Like Didion, like Carrie Watts, like my father, I claim the places in my dreams the hardest, I remember them most obsessively. In the Sanctuary of Hiraeth, homesickness is shared among those who love places so radically that we remake them in our own image. When place and self are inextricably bound, this is hiraeth.

Will I always dream of places that I love so radically? I suspect that I will. The yearning for these places is a bittersweet homesickness that both pains and delights. I will not wish it away, for its presence sustains me far more than its absence ever could.