Living Out Loud volume 7: By any other name ...

As soon as you tell people you're pregnant, they want to know the due date. Once you announce the due date, they are eagerly waiting for confirmation on if it's a boy or girl. Then everyone wants to know what you're going to name him or her. It's a natural progression. I'm sure once we come up with a name for our son, everyone will want to know which university he'll be attending. All this speculation and judgment has me thinking that a lot can get wrapped up in a person's name. In many ways it's one of the first things someone knows about you from the moment you say hello. And whether it's fair or not, if you tell me your name is De-BOR-ah, I'm going to make some quick assumptions about you.

My cousin has bright red hair and is named Sinderella Marie (yes, with an S). When she was a little girl my grandmother asked her what her name was and when she told her Grandma said, "that's nice honey, what's your real name?". As an adult, she makes a point to hide anything with her legal name on it, preferring to just go by Sindy.

As more people create "handles" for themselves (from blog titles to MMORPG characters to SCA personas), the name on one's drivers license is not nearly as relevant.

So for our next Living Out Loud project, I want you to tell us all about your name(s). How do you introduce yourself to others? What do most people call you? Do you like the name your parents gave you? Do you even go by that name? Are there names you have that only an elite few are allowed to use? What kind of power does your name give you?

Think of all those fairy tales where speaking someone's name had magical qualities. What magical qualities are in your name?

The specifics for this project are:

• Tell us about your name using the previous paragraphs as guidelines but interpreting it as you will. As always, the spirit of this project is to share something about yourself and not simply your name, rank and serial number.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. There were some entries I had to hunt for last month and I'd hate to leave anyone out.

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, August 2nd (the first Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

You all did a great job last month and I eagerly await what you create for this month's assignment. Take this opportunity to really introduce yourself to everyone.

Recap of 6th Living Out Loud project: Going home

I'm super pleased with the participation on this month's project themed on Going Home! As always, it's a joy to read about all your histories and ideas. So let's see what you all have wrought: Sarah's I have found me a home NOTE: I forgot to include this in my first rendition of this recap. Sorry, Sarah! I blame pregnancy brain. I was friends with a guy in high school whose parents were divorced and it always seem strange to me that he had "his Mom's" and "his Dad's" but nothing was necessarily Home. But in a lot of ways it's like having two homes, kind of like I have now as an adult.

Gina's Where is Home??? I always forget that Gina is from my relative neck of the woods originally, but more importantly spending even just a few minutes around her it's obvious how much her personal version of Home means to her. And thankfully, they're pretty portable.

Jen's Home is where the spark is ... The fireflies really got to me. In all my travels back and forth to Richmond, nothing beat that feeling of pulling up into the driveway and knowing you were about to be Home.

Jessica's Living Out Loud - Going Home Having been to her parents' home and seeing what it's like out there, I can see how it would give off strong feelings. I wouldn't want to be a teenager there, but I'd always love coming back to it as an adult.

Deb's So, where you from? I like how she explains where she's from as not a place but a frame of mind. Also interesting in that Keilyn and I were just chatting recently about the idea of being more "free range" as kids. Lots of food for thought here.

Collette's Nostalgia is a wonderful place to visit but no place to live Hooray, a guest post! I love getting these because it means the project compelled someone to write something that they weren't even sure where they'd put it, but it needed to be said. And I fascinated by most of the foods and drinks she listed, having never had any of them.

Kim's Living Out Loud Project: Home First, I love the look on Jack's face in that photo. And I can totally commiserate with the idea of having two homes, I just solved mine by putting them spitting distance from each other.

Rich's Home One day we'll go back to Germany together. And I'm eternally grateful that he agreed to come to me and leave his family behind.

Karal's Going home. This made me realize how spoiled I am to still have the freedom to visit every home I've had as a child. In may ways, though, home is just what you make of it and as she says you get to pick and choose what you take with you.

Megan's I wrote my name on the wall Oh my god, all the great old photos! Having spent most of the weekend sorting and scanning relics myself, I love looking at others.

Travis' Home (He tried to sneak this in and not submit it, but I'm adding it after the fact because it's awesome.) So fascinating that each of his examples, save maybe the last one is not something you'd immediately think of quilting into a blanket to depict home. But wow, what an awesome blanket this would make.

And my own OV and me

Interestingly, this project taught me that I have so many stories to tell that it's hard to put them all in one entry. I want to tell you about my Daddy's farm, about the beach houses where my mother lived where her brother slept in a closet so small his feet stuck out the door, about the decision to build onto our first house and keep it once we still bought a much bigger house, and about the struggles of choosing a home for ourselves and making it ours. So look for all of that soon.

As a note, I hope I got all the entries since a few folks wrote them but didn't send me an email with the link. If I missed your entry, just let me know and I'll add it here! I'm super excited that we had three new participants this month who all join the esteemed ranks of LOLers.

It was tough to pick a winner this month with so many quality entries. But I have a soft spot in my heart for guest posts, so I'm declaring Collette our winner! Collette will receive a collection of Sanders sundae toppings, for the nostalgia of it all.

Thank you again, for all of your support and enthusiasm for this ongoing project. I hope you all enjoy reading these trips down memory lane and that they've given you food for thought on what is important to you in a happy home.

On a related note, I'm pleased to say I've been asked to co-present one of the Room Of Your Own sessions at BlogHer conference this year titled Realllly personal blogging, how much info is TMI? with the talented Miss Britt and Terra. I'm really looking forward to it and am curious what others will have to say in the session as well.

And stay tuned for the theme for our next LOL Project!

OV and me

A few days ago, I went by my parents to visit and coincidentally my mother had uncovered a box of old photos. Since several photos were literal snapshots into my family over the years, I took a few of them to my therapy appointment to show Gary. I reminded him that my father and his family are all from Edgecombe County in North Carolina on a road that bears their last name since everyone living on it was from our family. He looked at the portrait of my mother from 1967 and said, "where is your mother from?" Me: "Oh, she's from Ocean View." Gary: "No, but where is her family from?" Me: "Well, she was born in Raleigh I think, but they all moved to Ocean View when she was really little." Gary: "No, before that. She looks a little Mediterranean." Me: "Oh! I have no idea. I'm not good at genealogy. She's from where we live now."

My father was born in Rocky Mount, North Carolina and lived on the same farm his whole childhood, one with its own family graveyard. Recently, though, he and Mom talked about picking a plot out over on Granby Street, just a few miles from where we are now.

As for me, there is definitely a very small radius of real estate that I call home. I'm irrationally dedicated to this neighborhood. I had been living across the state in Christiansburg, married and with a full-time job, when we drove back to Norfolk for a visit. I had the window down as we came out of the Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel and when the salt air hit me I suddenly realized that I was home. I wish I could bottle up that smell to share with you.

On the day I told Jeremy our marriage was over, I handed back my wedding rings and drove home. I stayed in a rental property of my parents, sleeping on a futon mattress on the floor, but I was back in the neighborhood where I rode my bike as a kid. I spent a lot of time walking up and down the beach then (since I was only a block from it) and came to realize how much I needed to be near the water.

Soon after that, I moved to another rental property that I eventually bought from my parents. Rich and I had many discussions while he was living many miles away in Richmond as to who would move for us to share an address, but I think we both knew that the further I was from Ocean View, the harder it would be on me. I come by this irrational behavior naturally. When Rich and I talked about moving to the next neighborhood over (a whopping four miles away), my mother lamented "I don't know why you have to go so far." So of course when Rich and I shopped for a larger home than our original house together, I would lament that certain houses we saw while walking the dog were "too far."

Rich: "You realize we got here on foot from our current house?" Me: "Yeah, but it's too far. I can't walk to the water or my parents' house from here."

That said, I consider any space I share with Rich to be Home, wherever it is. He was gone all day yesterday and I spent most of my day either doing laundry or moping about the house waiting for him to come home. Where do I feel safe and content? Wherever Rich is.

But where am I from? I'm from a part of the coast that is cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter than other cities inland. I'm from a shoreline protected by the Chesapeake Bay, so the water is perfect for learning to swim in the summer. I'm from a neighborhood where live oaks twist into shapes like giant bonsai trees and create so much shade that they make "clean swept yards" of sand and tiny acorns. I live just far enough away from the water to not have to buy flood insurance but to still put sheets of plywood over our windows when a hurricane comes.

Our local grocery store is equally frequented by poor families and yuppies, and there are nearly as many rainbow flags as American flags on front porches. This area was the place to be in the 40s and 50s, a place to avoid in the 80s, and is slowly turning back into the place to be again now. But some of us have been here all along.

We've learned to swim in these waters, learned to rollerskate on these sidewalks, frequented every single 7-Eleven available to us, practiced driving a stick shift on the dead end roads near the inlets and struggled to peddle our bikes up the hills of the Bay streets. And with a baby on the way, I look forward to creating another "OV lifer." I still can't quite bear to get one of those "OV before it was cool" bumper stickers, though.