Where is Your Home?

My family moved about when I was a kid. The only constant was where we went during the summer.

Now, the most 'home' is that ancestral summer house on Cape Cod, overlooking Buzzards Bay. We all share it now, and I'm heading there for a two week vacation next week...

Brazilians call their parent's house their "home" till the day they die.

I have no idea what my home is. I never lived in one for much more than a year.

Not Sao Paulo?

Is it a problem for you at all?

I lived in over 10 different homes in Sao Paulo. Not a problem really but it does make me anxious to settle down.

yes - I see - sweet dreams!

Hmm...if I had to pick a literal home, it would be the one I grew up in going through junior high and high school. It was the place I felt most secure in my life. It was sold, and torn down to put up some modern monstrosity. However, I would trade in all those memories to go back to Sandy Cove in West Cork, Ireland, where I felt an unexplainable spiritual connection to the land.

I moved 16 times between when I left "home" and when I bought the first time (several times with the same group of people, but still!). Boy was I glad to settle.


Seal - I think a lot of people have some sort of central family place that is "home' - if they move a lot, Sounds like yours is lovely.

Aha! Different again, Cav,

I feel that way about pictures of Iona, weird, huh?

Very cliche'd - but home is where the heart is !

Even though I have lived away from my parents home for 15 years, I am yet to call anywhere else, but that house as "home". Now that I am a house owner myself - I still refer to it as a "house" not "home"

And going "home", as I am doing next week, still excites me so much !!

I call the house that I grew up in, in Brooklyn, home. A lot of what I am today was developed in that house. Culturally, you can take a girl out of Brooklyn, but you can't take the Brooklyn out of the girl!

My parent's last home when I still lived with them was NW of Chicago, when I was in high school. They retired, sold the house, and moved away back in '79.

I never really liked living in the Chicago area all that much, but when I think of home, I'm still in high school living there with my parents.

I have no home, place, or people.

I grew up near Boston but moved to California on my own as soon as I was able, and have lived and worked around Silicon Valley since 1984. People come and go. Every couple years it's a different job and crew, different classes and clubs, different house to keep my things in, different "friends" and even the occasional relationship.

I can't stop the world from continuously changing all around me, so I get used to living each day alone, though I'd much prefer to have people in my life. Thinking of "going home" I think of trees -- long walks in the mountains or the woods. It doesn't matter where as long as there are trees, because those are the only things in my life that will still be here next year.

I dream about having family, or even friends that stick around longer than a year or two. Nice dreams. Sweet dreams. I'd give anything to acheive a sense of community, solidness or commitment, but after all the work and persistence I've put into such things I have to realize the world just changes and everything moves on.

So if I want to hike or ski, build high-tech systems or race motorcycles I just do. Nothing keeps me from it. I can spend a week meditating at an ashram, take a massage class, automate a financial database, or just sit at home and play music for a month or two. Whatever I acheive and celebrate I get used to doing it alone. Sometimes I don't use the door of my house for a week at a time -- either because I'm inside and I don't need groceries, or because I'm outside and I don't need a warm shower.

It's a life of convenience but also a nightmare. In a highly mobile and automated society not many people ask "How are you?" and really care. Most people I meet are severely preoccupied or barely coping. They don't have twenty minutes to spare unless I hire them to just sit, have some tea, and talk.

That's why trees are my family and my home. They will have to do.

I have moved so much as an adult and the house I grew up in is now owned by a different family. I certainly feel 'home' when I drive into the drive at our lot of land (and new house) on cape cod. The land itself feels 'home' to me.

We just signed our lease for one more year, with NO rent increase, which we were dreading (our neighborhood is gentrifying and we have a great deal --luckily, the landlord says we are his best tenants and he was receptive to E.G.'s sales pitch), which marks the first time I have lived someplace for more than 3 years since I left my father's house. This house, where the sozlet was born, is feeling more and more like home.

Bittersweet, though, since we will probably be here only one more year, a maximum of two more years. I keep having plans for the garden, for example, and being brought up short by the idea that I wouldn't be here to enjoy the results.

Neither of my parent's houses are home. I never really lived in my mom's house, though she's had the same one since before I left for college, and my dad moved to the suburbs -- I grew up IN Minneapolis. I guess Minneapolis as a whole is home in many ways; when it looked like we might move there, I got excited about all the things I could do with the kiddo that I did when I was a kid, about how many childhood and school friends still live there, or have returned from elsewhere. Thought about her playing with the daughter of my best friend when I was little. That kind of thought is very homey and misty.

If I'd choose one overweening "home", though, it would probably be Madison. I just learned that a friend would be moving there (not pd, someone else), and my first reaction was, "Hey, great! Did you know that's where I'm from?" I dunno what I meant by "from"... I was raised in Minneapolis (4-18), then went to college, met most of my "adult" friends, got my first "real" job, and got married in Madison (18-26). But the thought of going to the farmer's market, getting string cheese, beef jerky, apples, cider, and a great big bouquet and then going down to the Terrace, nodding and smiling at people over my bouquet on the way, stopping and having at least three conversations with friends I happen to run into, then having my little lunch sitting in a sunburst chair overlooking the lake -- that is profoundly "home" to me.

Interesting answers!

I know what you mean, Soz - in many ways, the house and neighbourhood I first moved out into when I left "home" - and had so much fun and heartbreak and made so many important friends (many I still have, nearly 30 years later - yikes!) is still home in many ways, too - and since then, I have always been happiest living near there - I am now a 15 minute walk from that very house.

Codeborg - I do not know how you manage - my family are all dead, and in a very real and solid sense my friends are "home" to me too. Sure, things change, but very slowly, generally, in my case - and I still have a friend (though we see each other very little, now) who I have had since I was six, She remembers my mother and sister, which is important to me! I have friends from nearly 30 years ago - some from about 20 years ago, and a group of work and professionally related stuff friends from 14 years ago. New people are always great - and all friends are intensely precious to me, whether new or old - but the old ones are a sort of rock. I see what you mean about the freedoms associated with your life - but you must be very strong to manage thus.

Land too, Little k! I know just what you mean! When I was little, my best friend's people owned a large olive grove, which we all played in all the time. A few years later, I kept my horse there, and how I loved the gnarled old trees in the morning light, and in the sunset - and their shade in the heat. One of my childhood friends and I were talking there when I went to feed my horse one evening - and she said "You know - we will always feel at home amongst olive trees" - and she is right.

I would love to see Cape Cod.

My home will always be Ireland. I was born and raised there and it's like a second-skin.

My mom inherited the house she grew up in, married, had children and still lives in that house with my Dad so you see I have a very vivid memory of one place I call "home". I know it like the back of my hand. I remember where I used to stash my secret candy supply and where "Santa" used to hide our Christmas presents. I remember the spot behind the house where I sneaked my first cigarette and the place in the bathroom where I hit my head as I fainted one day and knocked myself out. I remember the cupboard where my mom would store the Christmas pudding and how I would stick my nose in just to smell the wonderful aroma of it. I remember the neighbor who never tended his garden and how we used to sneak in and play 'jungle' there, or the teasing we used to get from everyone about how we called the downstairs room 'the parlor'.

Having moved to the U.S. (the second of her children to move to another continent) I travelled 'home' for the first time many years ago and, after my visit, as I was kissing my parents goodbye at the airport, I said I would call them as soon as I got home. I saw the tears well up in my mothers eyes as I referred to my new Boston apartment as 'home'. I was temporarily horrified and then we laughed.

I was born in Johnstown, PA (yes, the flood) and left at 15 for my freshman year at college. My parents moved west while I was in graduate school. My aunts and uncles are dead. My cousins have moved elsewhere. Johnstown is no longer "home".

In graduate school I met and married a nomad with a fine distain for authority. We moved 14 times in 12 years shuttling around five different states, London and Cornwall. Then he decided that the problem was a place or his job--that I was the reason he was not contented with his life.

Since the divorce I've move three more times and when I'm widowed, I'll probably make another major move to New England to spare my son and daughter-in-law the problems of long distance caretaking.

Geographically, I'm rootless, but I'm very fond of rereading favorite books. Beloved sub universes can seem like "home".

Good point about sub-universes! I first read "My Family and Other Animals" by Gerald Durrell when I was maybe 10, and always feel like their homes -- the Strawberry-Pink Villa et al -- are partially my home, as well.

I now consider home the place I live here in Seattle, which I call The Hermitage. (How's that for a convoluted sentence? Yet somehow I like it...)

No one I know lives in the house I grew up in, and, in any case, I wouldn't consider it "home" now because I was so much under my parent's collective thumb in those days. That was on Long Island, a place I was glad to see the back of. Since then I've lived in Upstate NY, Eugene and Seattle. I have warm feelings for each of them and felt "at home" in each place, because I felt I had some control of my life there. Spent time with people I chose to, doing, at least some of the time, what I wanted to do.

It's about friends now and familiar places. Nowadays I can ride the bus to work, and the driver doesn't even want to see my bus pass--he says he knows I have one. If that's not home, what is?