I thought I’d comment first on Stewart Woolner’s blog. It seemed appropriate because we have some shared experience in the area we wrote about for this week; he was my roommate in first year. We had never met before, and moving into a room where you can essentially take one step and poke the person from any given point will definitely shake your sense of “home.” His story is beautiful and simple, and the most evident assumption we share is that home is in a sense of community rather than actual place. Of course its kind of rote to say that a house does not necessarily a home make, but this seeming cliche is one that is true and impossible not to utilize in this sort of assignment and Stew manages to make use of it in a way that feels new. We also make the same assumption that home works on a sort of continuum. Your sense of home is not inert, but dependent on many volatile elements. What makes and alters home for the story’s little protagonist is the influx of people into his life, and we get to see his sense of home finding itself. For me, I assumed that home was  sort of stable place in my memory, but with each new visitation, it was altered by my changing perceptions.

Next I find that I share much with Sarah Steer’s values and ideas about home. She speaks of how her sense of home had a distinctly territorial aspect, tied to the house she grew up in. Home quickly became a place fixed in her mind which she could visit, until she let her old sense of home, that unchanging pink house, become coloured by and commingled with new experiences. In both of our stories the perceptions of home shift as time progresses; a home only really makes itself out to be a home in hindsight, it takes on its most comforting aspects with the help of memory’s embellishment (“‘there’ is what creates ‘here'” she notes- the past is an object that casts a different shadow depending on the angle from which it is viewed).

“It is with this in mind that I, subconsciously or otherwise, have constructed a sense of home out of those less tangible things.” -Hava Rosenberg, “Home is where I want to be, but I guess I’m already there”

What I identify with most in Hava’s post is the idea that we construct home. This is not so much an assumption as it is a reaction to one. As was mentioned above, home is not unchanging, nor does it emerge organically from some void. We are participants in the construction of “home,” which is why an exercise like this is important- it makes us look at our conceptions of home and check ourselves and our assumptions. Hava says “you can always come back” to home, but given her vision of home as a sort of concatenation or patchwork of memories, you get the impression that the home that exists in memory is going to change each time she revisits it. Also, Talking Heads rule.