I’ll be writing about some of my peers’ blog posts and the similarities in their ideas of home. There was great variety in the responses, both in the substance of the homes they spoke of and in the approach they took to elucidating the idea. One thing strikes me above all: these are evocative, emotional stories. Home is powerful.

“The places I feel at home are the places I’ve grown into, the people I’ve grown with. Or, more accurately, home is where I’ve let myself grow.” ~Melissa Kuipers

Not surprisingly, the look and feel of places features prominently in the posts: Melissa Kuipers writes about her childhood house with its different-coloured carpets, Hailey Froehler about the two neighbourhoods where she spent her early years, Charmaine Li about beaches, climbing trees, and ostrich pens around UBC campus. A second theme comes through as well, that of childhood memories. Most of the posts emphasized early life, and gave only secondary importance to the places where the writers and their families lived now (all had moved at least once).

“I don’t remember why, but I was so very happy in this house, even though it was much smaller than the only other one I remember.” ~Charmaine Li

Home can be a paradoxical concept – neither place nor identity, but a compromise between the two, a conversation between inside and out. It stays with us if we should leave it behind, but always shifts in the journey. As it turned out, this was an only slightly less pervasive theme: the sense of homelessness, of displacement, of struggle to reconcile one’s immediate physical surroundings with the bonds one feels with far-off times, places, and people.

“I feel like, because the term “home” is so ambiguous, it doesn’t necessarily have to relate to any physical space specifically.” ~Hailey Froehler

Hannah Vaartnou takes us through three meanings of home in her account of a childhood shaken by a tragic accident. First, at a very young age, the physical – “our little bungalow on a half acre lot.” Then, after the strain on the household following the accident, she describes the home found in “the pages of a good fantasy book.” “My imaginary world was a home of sorts,” she relates. “I cannot say I have ever had a sense of that in reality.”

Finally, Hannah adds a third sense of home, one I instantly felt I could relate to: not attached to a place, but to a commonality between many. “As long it was a beach,” she writes, “then I was home.”

I found this to be a poignant illustration of the relationships that emerge between place and belonging. The feelings and memories, the connections Hannah made to the beach and the ocean endured the move to new parts of the coastline: a conversation between an inner feeling and many outer places, some long familiar, some yet to be discovered.

Overall, I was touched by the openness everyone showed in sharing their personal memories. Often I felt a sense of closeness with them in spite of the wide differences between my life’s trajectory and theirs, and between theirs and each other’s. There is power in the way one’s tellings of the past can shape and reshape the present.

Froehler, Hailey. “The Ambiguity of ‘Home’. ” English 470A. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web. 06 June 2015.

Kuipers, Melissa. “Where We Grow.” True North. UBC Blogs. 04 June 2015. Web. 06 June 2015.

Li, Charmaine. “A Home with Many Adventures.” Canadian Yarns and Storytelling Threads. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web. 06 June 2015.

Vaartnou, Hannah. “Home is in Your Own Heart.” Hannah and Canada. UBC Blogs. 05 June 2015. Web. 06 June 2015.