“Read at least 3 students blog short stories about ‘home’ and make a list of the common shared assumptions, values and stories that you find. Post this list on your blog with some commentary about what you discovered.”
I ended up focusing Kaitie’s “Belonging to Home,” Alishae’s “Home Is A Feeling,” and Freda’s “A Home Is Not (Always) A House” for this assignment, although I ended up reading a lot of other blogs and I think my observations are applicable to many of them. In reading these blogs, I came across three major commonalities.
The first is to emphasize location as an aspect of home. Home may be more than a physical location, but in keeping with the most traditional definition of the word, the location is still an important part of it. Where all three authors diverge from tradition is in the specific locations that are described. Alishae gives specific striking details of multiple locations rather than a particular house: the “sound the leaves make when the breeze rushes through them,” the “shimmering skyscrapers,” and the “wooden floors and fireplace.” Kaitie talks about a family cottage and a lake as evoking a stronger connection than the actual home she grew up in. And Freda connects home to the inside of her family’s car, as well as to an experience on a particular mountain road.
Secondly, the three pieces all seem to emphasize positive connections with other people: Freda talks about values of togetherness and love, while Kaitie’s story emphasizes the importance through talking of her family’s connection to the place and through the story with her friend Courtney; Alishae talks of home existing in long-term friends or in her aunts’ stories. I think the presence of family is also a very typical part of the way home is viewed, although many of the blogs echo Kaitie’s and Alishae’s in emphasizing the importance of friends as well as family in creating a sense of home.
My third observation can be summed up with the title of Alishae’s blog post: “Home is a feeling.” In almost all of the blogs I read this week, home really is a feeling, one which encompasses and is driven by aspects of location and family connection but also goes beyond them. Freda mentions associating the feelings of comfort, familiarity, and safety with the idea of home. Kaitie describes a sense of belonging. It hadn’t occurred to me before, but I think all of these feelings about home are extremely common and all of them play an important role in defining what home is for us.
In considering what kind of assumptions we’re making about home, I started to think about how home never seems to be presented as unsafe, lonely, confining, or something to escape from. It’s always just assumed that it’s a good thing. Maybe for many of us the very definition of home is a “good thing,” and if a home stops being a good thing then it stops being a home at all – and maybe that says something about how we as a culture think about home?
Works Cited
Abeed, Alishae. “Home Is A Feeling.” ENGL 470A: Canadian Studies. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/alishaeabeed/2015/06/05/assignment-22-home-is-a-feeling/>
Li, Freda. “A Home Is Not (Always) A House.” ENGL 470: Whose Canada Is It? <https://blogs.ubc.ca/fredaliblog/2015/06/05/blog-4-a-home-is-not-always-a-house/>
Warren, Kaitie. “Belonging to Home.” Canadian Stories. <https://blogs.ubc.ca/canadianstories/2015/06/05/belonging-to-home/>
Hi Cecily,
A great conclusion – home is just a good thing. I think that’s what we mean when we say, about someone or something, “it feels like home”.
Thanks!
Kaitie
🙂