What? I am five, spinning around in circles, blue sky blurring into green, green grass before my wide-eyed gaze. I’m happy, caught in the moment like only a child can be. My mum calls, “Time to go home.” The words themselves fill me with disappointment, because they mean an end to momentary happiness. I don’t stop to think about what the noun means-I don’t yet know nouns exist, or that words are arbitrary terms which are simply assigned a particular meaning(or perhaps I do?)-we are going to a house, where I have lived as long as I can remember, where my family lives. This is “home”. It means a place to lay my head, a place to return to, a place where I don’t have to wear shoes-or even more dreadful, socks!-a place I will always be able to find on a map. It is a physical location, surrounded by a fence, set borders dividing us from the neighbors(although those borders are quite bendable in one direction, but not the other). It’s a house, a piece of grass and some trees. For me, then, it was referred to as home. But what did that mean?

I still have no idea.

Who? If someone asked me to describe my family as a kid, this would have been my response(nobody ever did, as I never had the kind of formal, regimented education where they ask kids to do things like that): Mum, Dad, Grandpa(a cherished memory preserved in a picture frame),2.5 kids, a dog or two, myriad other pets, stuffed or otherwise. We were the epitome of “average”, the essence of “normal”. I only had three other “real” people in the world who I cared for deeply enough to consider the phrase, home is where the heart is . Yet, crack open a book and start reading, and I have the biggest family in the universe. Mr. Darcy and Sherlock Holmes and Aragorn and Elrond and Michelangelo and Enid Blyton’s creations are a part of my family. All I need is the words, or even just my own imagined memories, and I’m there. I’m home, safe and secure and loved.  I never thought about it at the time, but in hindsight, that sense of safety and love I felt in the presence of my family, real or furry or otherwise, was probably the closest I’ll ever come to defining the feeling of “home”.

When? I spent most of my childhood in the 18th century(or 17th or 14th or early 20th), gliding through worlds long dead or never existent in my overly fertile imagination. I spent it in the aether, on the air, in my head. It felt like home, suspended from time. I’ve always hated change, and home could never be lost if it wasn’t real.

There was an old picture hanging on my parents’ wall when I was a kid, which I would stare at for hours. It was black  and white, with a bit of recoloured green at the bottom of the giant oak tree, upon which two persons leaned, a tall figure and a little girl. A bearded man, right out of a turn of the century(20th, but of course when this memory was recorded by my brain, there was no such ambiguity) reenactment, had his arm around a morose boy leaning on a crutch, one of his legs uneven to the other. Two smaller boys stared shyly at the camera from the other side of the tree. One of those boys was my great-great-grandfather. One day, my mum opened a mysterious old black briefcase, and showed me our family’s past. Someone has to carry on the flame. I know an awful lot about that picture now, and the people in it. I even know where it was taken. They were the displaced, coming to rest in a place where they left a mark, but couldn’t hold on to. The fact they lived, in the place they did, however briefly, so long ago, makes me feel at home there, in the now. I don’t know why, but it does.

Where? When I was seven, I wanted to live at Baker Street. I imagined I could stay in Rivendell forever. I thought Bag End was so much cooler than my own living room. When I was scared I could run up the mentally shining steps of Lothlorien’s interconnected flets. I read about the past, watched it, imagined it, wished it, breathed it, listened to it. It was my home away from home, my escape from a time and place that could never live up to my childish imaginings.

I grew up feeling out of place, caught in a soulless place with no connection to the ground or the sky. I loved the tree in my front yard, purple in summer and copper in autumn like a jewel of nature rustling before my eyes. I felt at home in the stacks of my local library(even now, something about the smell of that moldy old carpet settles deep in my chest and spreads a sense of calm). I visited relatives I felt no connection to, stood on ground I knew from my mother’s stories and files and old documents used to “belong” to my ancestors. One of the streets still bears our name. Most of the land is still there, thanks to the Agricultural Land Reserve. The gate my great-great uncle crippled his leg swinging on is long gone, but I can imagine where it might have been. I stand on a crop of land, where my mother spent much of her childhood, where my parents fell in love, where I used to play. I’ve never lived here, never had a “home” here, not one with boundaries or borders or places to lay one’s head, and yet, and yet…it feels like home.

Why? What is home? A feeling, a place, a person, a definition, a border, a reality, a fantasy? My ramblings above seem to suggest that for me, it is all those things. I have assigned the label of home onto all those qualities, held there by the stories I listened to, the stories I was told. I have never felt safer, or more loved, than when I was telling, or being told, a story. And in this story, safe=home.

(For the record, I was never an HP fan, I never read the books, and only watched the movies because my brother insisted-yet somehow(well, mostly due to Fanfiction), this defines home for me better than almost anything: Story as Home (the first 15 seconds are the important point, but it’s a cool video).

Works Cited:

“Home is where the heart is.” Idioms. The Free Dictionary. Farlex, inc., 2014. Web. June 9, 2014.

Cut It Out. “Hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home.” Online Video Clip. Youtube. Youtube, July 9, 2011. Web. June 10, 2014.