Write a short story (600 – 1000 words) that describes your sense of home; write about the values and the stories that you use to connect yourself to, and to identify your sense of home.
Home, for me, is an accumulation of the bits and pieces of my life.
Home is that time that I stayed with my Dad in Whitehorse and had a terrible toothache. Him and his wife had no idea what to do with me, so my Grandma picked me up and took me home with her. She ran me a bubble bath in her giant jacuzzi tub, and made me buttered toast. I immediately felt better.
Home is the swimming in the pool at my Grandparent’s apartment complex where I broke a tooth in the sixth grade. I wasn’t used to how fast I could swim with flippers, and swam right into the concrete edge – tooth first.
Home is the orange basement bedroom of my childhood best friend, and the scary basement steps that led to it.
Home is the Buffy the Vampire theme song. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmoU05_Fr5A (that look at the end).
Home is the time that I made a pot of boiling lavender water to use for an at-home steam spa experience. My younger sister, seven at the time, asked for her own bowl. I gave her her own and a towel to drape over her head while she leaned over the bowl and let the steam purify her pores. Sixteen year old me was very concerned about pores. My sister (the blonde girl who is losing at Monopoly in the above picture) accidentally tucked the edges of the towel underneath the family-famous-gigantic-popcorn-bowl of boiling water, and when she lifted her head, tilted the bowl, and poured the whole thing onto her entire body. I quickly stripped her down to her skivvies, and threw her into our two compartment sink full of dishes. I ran the cold water and used the detachable spray nozzle to drench her whole lobster-coloured body. At that moment my Dad walked in to the kitchen. My sister is balanced precariously on plates covered in ketchup and ranch dressing. Her feet have kicked over the coffee pot on the counter. Her arms have flung the dish soap and sponges onto her stomach. There’s water all over the floor, and everything smells like lavender. My sister and I are screaming at each other. I’m apologizing and she’s using words I’ve never heard a seven year old use before. We pause just long enough to hear my Dad mutter an almost silent, “What the f*ck?”, and burst out laughing. I am sixteen years old and I laugh so hard I pee my pants. My sister pees on the dishes. We spend an hour cleaning up.
I am twenty-five years old and I have lived in twenty-four different houses. My parents have never owned a house and have always managed to find something better or more suitable for our family by the time the lease at our current rental is up. Until my last year of high school, I spent every summer in Whitehorse, YT. I’ve lived alone as a volunteer in Brazil (https://ohtheplaceslaurawillgo.wordpress.com/) and the Northwest Territories (http://www.frontiersfoundation.ca/about-us). Somewhere around the second grade, as I packed up my lava lamp and personally bejewelled radio, I realized that home was something I had with me all the time. Home is a feeling. If I attempt to catalogue and interrogate every little piece of home I’ve carried with me – if I were to curate a museum of my “home”, it would all boil down to the same feelings and affirmations. “Home” are the places, or the people, or the situations that make me feel safe. Home makes me feel important and valued. Home is where I am genuine, whether that is genuinely sad or happy or angry. Home is my own imagined territory – a collection of spaces where I was unabashedly myself and other people were themselves with me. Most importantly, home is something that I can share with other people, whether as a reflection of what it means to me, or as an invitation to make new memories with me in this safe space.
JuliaUllrich
June 6, 2016 — 10:15 pm
Hey Laura! Now I get where you’re coming from, having so many homes in your life. And I love the phrase you used, “my own imagined territory.” I totally agree, and this even encompasses the feeling of home that can travel with you to far off places. I always catch myself when on holiday somewhere, referring to our hotel room as ‘home’, but even that makes sense when it’s a safe space you can share with others you love. Thanks for sharing your story. I can only imagine what your kitchen smelled like doused in lavender!
Anonymous
June 13, 2016 — 6:37 am
Hi Julia,
I sometimes refer to hotels as home as well 🙂 Something interesting – both my Dad and boyfriend work out of town and come back to where we live every couple weeks and they are both very careful and particular about never calling the places that they live while they work, home. If I slip up and call it home in a conversation over the phone with my boyfriend, he always corrects me and says it’s just his “house”.
sean sturm
June 7, 2016 — 1:37 pm
Hi Julia,
Even though we have had a very different experience of home (at least in the physical sense), I find it interesting that our final definitions are so similar.
I grew up in one house, in the same neighbourhood, at the same school for my entire childhood and teen years. Initially when I moved out I was terrified about what that meant, constantly trying to find ties and connections to my place of upbringing. It is only years later, more poignantly after this assignment, that I realize that home is the people and the experiences. In my reality, and if I read your story properly, ‘home’ is a state of mind. It is a place that is forever intact in our memories and experiences. Reading your piece was enlightening, in the sense the commonality in your experience, almost a core human desire for stability, in what ever form that may take.
Let me know what you think.
Anonymous
June 13, 2016 — 6:43 am
Hi Sean,
I had a friend who lived in the same house her whole life and I helped her pack for university. We were emptying out her desk and finding old unfinished homework from the third grade. Needless to say I thought that was the weirdest thing ever and was freaking out. I have keepsake boxes filled with particular things, but every time we move I go through every teeny tiny thing I own and keep it or chuck it.
When you talk about finding “ties and connections” to your place of upbringing, I think the closest way I can relate to that is what I feel about Canada (and maybe the purpose of this assignment). Something that always stayed the same about where we lived was the country, so maybe that’s why I feel so patriotic at times?
Thanks for sharing your thoughts 🙂
Laura