What are some of the common shared assumptions, values and stories in our blog posts about home?
I really enjoyed reading peoples’ stories of home, and kept thinking how nice it is to be able to talk about something so precious and personal in a class setting, and to share publicly.
One common thread was discussion about what home actually is, confusion about distinguishing between home as a house, a hometown, or a homeland (Yolande). Unlike Heidi, for example, who wonders when she stopped saying she was going home for Christmas, I continue to say I’m going home for the weekend, eight years after I moved away. In half of that time I lived in one city five hours away from home, and in the second half I’ve lived in a few different places, mostly further away and most of them multiple times back and forth. I’m sick of being away from home, and what I really want to do is live closer to home. Closer to your parents you mean, a lot of people say. Yes, my parents are the main reason. But closer to home also means close to what is familiar, like the feeling of turning a certain corner on a certain road that I remember from the first time I drove by myself. As Melissa describes so well, home is where we build rituals and where we grow (Kuipers).
I’ve found a sense of home with the man who I’ll live my life with. But wherever we live together, I don’t think will replace the home I have always known. I think I’ll add more homes to the originals, instead of shifting the place I call home to a new place. The places I grew will always be home, maybe most strongly the one special place where I grew up. But, I think a lot of us agree that home is a changing thing.
Comfort is another theme. A lot of us describe home as being a place where we feel comfortable, safe, secure, familiar. Whitney pinpointed this feeling of “returning”, something that you can feel in a place you spend some time in, even if it’s not home (Millar). Almost all of us, as university students and in a big city like Vancouver, have left home at least once. Leaving home probably means as many different things as home itself, and going home does not seem at all to be the opposite of leaving home.
Thank you for sharing your thoughts about home, such a dear thing or place or state or feeling.
Kaitie
Works Cited
Kuipers, Melissa. “Where We Grow.” True North. UBC Blogs, 4 June 2015. Web. 8 June 2015. https://blogs.ubc.ca/melissakuipers/2015/06/04/home/
Millar, Whitney. “Let Me Come Home.” Whitney ENGL 470 Experience. UBC Blogs, 5 June 2015. Web. 8 June 2015. https://blogs.ubc.ca/whitneymillar/2015/06/05/let-me-come-home/
Yolande, Heidi. “Assignment 2:2.” Sine Loco. UBC Blogs, 6 June 2015. Web. 8 June 2015. https://blogs.ubc.ca/470asummer2015/lesson-22/
Image taken by me in October 2010.
🙂