DW's Blog

Open The Windows

by DW Green — October 21, 2026

“On homesickness, and a boy whose name I have lost.”

It has rained here for three days, and I am no good at all.

We close on the thirtieth. Seventeen days. The house of thirty years is sold, the new one is smaller and waiting, and the boxes have started appearing in the hall the way they do, a few at a time, so that nobody has to admit what is happening all at once.

And then it rained. The smell came up off the ground the way it only does in the desert, and the sound of it landed on this particular roof, which I have heard several thousand times and will hear a handful more, and the light went that color it goes in the evening after a storm.

In the evenings now, tears are my companion. I am seventy-five and I have stopped fighting them.

• • •

I was a boy, and there was a weekend school outing in the mountains west of Denver.

I got homesick on the bus. Not the feeling first and the body after — the body went first. I was sick on that bus, in front of everyone, in the way a child is sick, which is to say completely and without warning and with no possibility of hiding it.

I remember the embarrassment, and I remember how quickly it stopped mattering, which is its own small mercy.

Here is what nobody told that boy, and what I did not know until this month.

Homesickness used to be a disease.

A Swiss medical student named Johannes Hofer coined a word for it in 1688, in a dissertation at Basel: Dissertatio Medica de Nostalgia, oder Heimwehe. He built it from two Greek words — nostos, the homecoming, and algos, the pain. The pain of the return, or the pain for want of it.

He was not being poetic. He meant a condition, with a presentation he could list: fatigue, anxiety, heart palpitations, fever. He believed it could kill, and the patients he had in mind were Swiss mercenaries dying of it in foreign armies, men who got better when they were sent home and worse when they were not. The diagnosis stayed in the medical literature for two centuries. Doctors took it seriously through the American Civil War.

So I was not metaphorically homesick on that bus. I had the documented clinical presentation of a condition that once killed soldiers, and Hofer would have written me up.

The body went first. It has a habit of that. At seventy-five it sends water down my face before I have worked out what I am feeling. At ten, on a bus, it was less dignified and it was saying the same thing.

There is an inversion in it I cannot leave alone. Hofer’s Swiss got sick for the mountains. I got sick in them. Same disease, opposite direction, and the Rockies did not care either way.

• • •

Somebody took care of me.

A kid. Another boy on that trip, who was not asked to and did not consult anybody. We got to the place we were staying and he looked after me, and then he did the thing I have been turning over for sixty-five years.

He opened all the windows.

Think about that. The instinct with a homesick, sick child is to seal him in. Wrap him up. Make the room small and warm and close, build a little replica of home around him and keep the world out. That is what comfort looks like to most of us, and it is what I would have done.

He opened every window in the room. He made it colder. He made it noisier. He connected that room completely to the outside, in the mountains, at night.

The other kids complained. They were right to — it was freezing.

And it worked.

For thirty years I have lived in a house with a busy road along the back property line. It was a roadblock to some buyers and never once a problem to the people who lived there. When we moved in I heard the traffic. For a while I listened for it, which is worse. And then at some point I could not name, I stopped sorting it into something that was happening to me, and it became what it had been the whole time, which is the sound of a town being alive a little way off.

Noise, I eventually decided, is only sound that has met a no. Silence is not the absence of sound but the absence of resistance.

I thought I worked that out in my seventies. A ten-year-old administered it to me in the Rockies in 1961, with no theory whatsoever, and the whole of it fit in one gesture. The cure for the sealed-off ache is not more sealing. Open it up. Let the outside come in. Stop supplying the no.

He paid for it in other people’s comfort, which is honest about what care costs a room.

• • •

I do not remember his name.

That is the part that has made me sad this week, more than I expected. It meant a great deal to me at the time. It means more now. And I cannot produce the name, there is no one left to ask, and there is no paper anywhere in the world with it on it.

Names are not a small matter in my family. My father was a forward observer in the war, and somewhere in the Ardennes he made a promise over the body of his best friend — a Texan who did not come home from the Bulge — that his next son would carry the man’s name so that his friend would not vanish. I am that son. My legal first name is two letters and no periods. They are initials, and they are his.

So I was raised to believe a name is the thing you keep. Some names are kept by being carved and some by being called. This one is in no mouth. I lost it.

But I have learned something about my own memory this year that is the only thing I have found that holds.

Memory is not a filing cabinet. It is more like the cardiac monitor my doctor implanted under my collarbone after a stroke last February — a device that listens continuously and cannot store continuously, so it keeps only what gets flagged and writes over the rest. Seventy-five years went in. A shoebox came out.

The name was not saved. The care was.

I have carried, every day since, a working knowledge of what it is to be looked after by somebody who did not have to and did not wait to be asked. I expect it is in how I ran a company for thirty years. I expect it is in how I was with my own son. The boy’s name is gone and his act is still operating, which means it got filed somewhere deeper than the label.

And he never knew. He opened some windows, took grief from the other kids, and got on with his life, with no idea that a man would be sad about him in 2026. A kindness given with no receipt and no possibility of one.

Until this week that name was simply not there. Now it is a thing I notice missing, which means the boy is more present to me today than he has been in sixty-five years.

I cannot say his name. I can say what he did. Those turn out not to be the same debt.

• • •

I have been reading lately about what the writer Brené Brown calls spiritual homesickness — Hofer’s two Greek words, repurposed for the ache of being at the end of one thing and the beginning of the next, leaving and arriving at the same time. She writes that she is never homesick for the first half of her life, and wonders whether that is because it was never really her home.

I am seventy-five, sitting in a house I have seventeen days left in, with rain on the roof. Of course that landed.

But I want to mark where I part company with her, because it took me a long time to see it.

Nearly everything I write now comes out of the first half of my life. A fifth-grade art room and a teacher named Mrs. Haymaker. A block in Denver in 1959, a doorbell, four words. A wrestling ring made of a bedspread and two pillows. Otis Redding coming out of a console television that took a full minute to warm up.

I am in those rooms constantly. And I am not homesick for a single one of them.

Because I do not go back to stay. I go back to fetch.

Nostalgia wants to return and remain. It is a one-way longing and it has never produced anything. What I do is walk into a room from 1959, pick something up, and carry it out — and it comes out as a page, and occasionally it is useful to somebody now. That is a different verb. That is not longing. That is retrieval.

A coda is not a return to the beginning. It is the passage at the end that gathers what the piece has been doing and carries it out the door.

• • •

Last February a stroke took the speaking voice I had used for fifty years of work, and a written one arrived in its place. I have put more on paper in the seven months since than in three decades of talking. Which is why I can stand the thirtieth at all. The sadness is real and specific — it is about a roof and a smell and a particular quality of evening light that will belong to somebody else in seventeen days, and I am not going to talk myself out of any of it. But I am not homeless on the thirty-first. I am just going to have a different address for the body.

There is going to be a temptation, in the new place, to seal it up. To make it a careful replica of the one we are leaving — same chair in the same relation to the same window, the familiar things arranged to say nothing has happened here. That is the sealed room. That is the cozy little duplicate of home, built to keep the world out, and I know exactly how it feels from the inside because I have wanted it all week.

A boy in the mountains west of Denver, whose name I would give a great deal to remember, already told me what to do instead, and he did not say a word while he did it.

Open the windows.

Yes, it will be cold. Yes, somebody will complain.

It works.