I’ve never liked the expression, “Home is wherever I’m with you.*” Maybe it’s too cute for me. Or maybe, it’s too much of a copout. Used by nomads and couples who refuse to settle down**.
*Nothing against Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Their song remains catchy and hummable.
**Again, nothing against the nomad. If I could whittle all my belongings down to one bag, make my dogs more chill, and Hubby’s work would let him work while roaming the world—I’d be a nomad tomorrow.
I often treat the word home with literal application. It is a place. It has a mailing address. It is where everyone knows they can find you. It’s where your bills and trash mail are sent.
Our homes tell a lot about us. They hold all our secrets. They are time capsules. They are the fly on the wall. There are frescoes and portraits laid by memory in the wallpaper, the wood grain, the way that one floorboard squeaks or the back door never shuts without two hands.
The home is a storyteller, whose stories only make sense to the people who created routine together within its walls.
All depending on your life’s journey, the word home might send you through a series of places. Which home are we considering when we say home? The home of our pasts? The one we grew up in? The home of our present? A home we’ve spent a lot of time in? When adults say they are going home for Christmas they aren’t referring to the home of their present. They mean home. Where we grew up, somehow, unavoidably, will always be linked to the word, to the place, to the emotion, of home.
Yes, I’ve contradicted myself here. Because even though home is a noun, a place, home is also an emotion, and a changing one at that. It’s an emotion which can in a split second be cozy and content, or anxious and angry, or sad and sullen. All together, all at once.
I recently had the pleasure of driving around the neighborhood where my dad grew up. We went to dinner—I picked a restaurant which happened to be in the city he grew up in—and naturally, this invoked a field trip by the old house, a house I couldn’t remember because of how young I was the last time I was there.
His reaction to seeing his home was a gift for me. This was a place where he spent a fraction of his life. No matter the journey, there will always be a priceless value to that plot of land, that building, the roads we drove on, and the memories which were planted there.
It got me thinking about my own home. The one with the etchings of my childhood and growing with my brothers and a time when life was not at all what it was now. That home still lives in my mind. Those moments are a rosy cloud of climbing trees and playing croquet and sibling sleepovers. It’s something that can never be recreated. Something that at times is shared, but right now is only mine.
When it comes down to it, home is a table for one that is set for many.
Leave a Reply