Maybe home is where we live right now. Or almost.
Maybe home is where we grew up and still feel that we belong. Maybe home feels like a million miles away or maybe it feels so close that country roads can take us home.
Maybe it’s a way of life that’s almost gone. Maybe it’s a place that both calls to us, and repels us.
Maybe home is a whole country, or a province or state, or a city or small town, or maybe it’s more tightly defined: a specific house.
Maybe home is family. Maybe it’s friends with whom we share a sense of humour, however goofy. Maybe it’s just one person along the broken road.
Maybe home is the way we felt when we were young or when we were young and in love. Maybe it’s something we recognize best when we leave it.
Maybe it’s our final destination, as we head for our own version of the green, green grass of home.
Maybe someone can sing us back home or maybe we can’t go home again. At least we can turn our faces homeward bound.
Look homeward, angel. Whatever home is to each of us, may we find it.
Having a ‘permanent’ home in Ottawa and a ‘winter’ home in Tucson, I’ve mulled this over a lot.
Ultimately, I think home is wherever we feel that we’re ‘home’. And it certainly changes over time.
Marion – We’re lucky to have a home. To have more than one — however we define or categorize them — is an incredible luxury.
Your own sidebar expresses it well: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there,
They have to take you in.” Frost got it right. It’s not a place as much as a response to you.
Jim T
Jim T – The old “Where everybody knows your name” refrain from Cheers as one aspect, maybe? I’d sure agree that it’s more a feeling than a place.
I agree that home is a mental and emotional construct. Although you and so many others have moved around, I still live within a very few miles of my birth home. I have outlived the hospital where I was born, but my house is about a mile from there. Travel is wonderful, but I am always glad to return home. Since the pandemic, I too have been very glad to have a home.
Judith – 🙂 The Big Guy was born in the old, old Selkirk Hospital if I have the iterations right – it’s an odd feeling, outlasting an institution. Was it Adele Rogers St. John who said that as she got older, she still liked to travel but enjoyed the coming home more than the going out.
home is where the heart is — so I am at home anywhere…
Barbara – 🙂