Home. Home is a story. May I tell you mine?

My Home began with sunny beaches and the scent of fresh-sliced oranges. My father was doing his Master’s degree and my mother was growing our family in Northern California.

Next, Home became Downing Road, with its willow-treed cul-de-sac, strawberry garden, and small, pig-tailed playmates. Here Mitza the cat – Mitza the patient, Mitza the black-and-white – came Home to join us.

Then Home became woodsy, with deer and adventures and berries for foraging: a place to imagine, to create, and to drift off to sleep hearing tales about the Dog Named Blue. Home was soft cuddles, warm PJs, and prayers; my sister, my mother and father, and my insular bedroom. Home was the space between our house and town, and the books on the shelf and the toys on my bed; the boys from next door and the ranch down the road, the flowers we picked and brought Home to Mom.

 

 

Then, we moved to town ourselves, and home was what we brought with us. In town things were different. In town, home was drawing and watching TV, finding time between lessons to run through the woods and pretend that they were wild, too – that they had not been domesticated.

Soon after that home was Kelowna, and everything changed. Home became growing up, learning… and striving. Home became peace talks and What is this? questions; classes and “time to know What Really Matters.”

But, home was still books and still critters and playing. Home was still parents and sister, quiet evenings and family dinners. Home was still prayers, and there was a farm not too far away.

Home was also a view of the Valley, skies, and mountains. Home was always mountains. The ones that ringed the Okanagan weren’t as high as the ones I was used to, but they still whispered home to me. And, if some of the other things home had been had gone missing, home was still love, and there was still food on the table and a kitten snuggled up in my bed.

Next, home would become a place to retreat from the trials of middle school and the perils of high school; but I could never have imagined as a child that home would become a place to sneak out of at night, a place to hide boyfriends and to put what I was really going to wear in my purse before I walked out the door. Home was where I brought friends for sleepovers, where we dressed up for our cameras, took pictures, and uploaded them to MySpace; and where we laughed together and then – maybe – cried alone later. It was where we learned to cook, learned to focus, and tried to learn to fail. It was where we learned that we could not be perfect, but that we ought to be loved anyways.

Home is still BC, and now home is rest and retreat. It’s a place to belong; to reserve space for what matters most inside. It’s a place where connection is more important than time, and values matter more than practicality.

It is also, however, a place where prudence takes precedence and survival originates. It’s a place to search for when it disappears; a place to wrestle with the confusion that I hide in my day to day life. It’s a place to gather up the scattered pieces of myself and fit them together into a coherent whole; And it’s a place where, no matter what, I can always find help.

Home is a huge concept. It means so many different things to so many different people. For this reason, I feel that many of the best explanations of home and its importance have been offered in music by lyrics (they say poetry is the language that nothing else can speak).

One of the most popular English songs associated with home is “I’ll Be Home for Christmas,” recorded by Bing Crosby in 1943. This song was a hit largely because of its timing: there were thousands of soldiers overseas, away from home, unsure whether or not they would ever return. I can only imagine how intensely they must have longed for what they knew when they heard this song on the radio.

Christmas is a tradition that not everyone relates to, though; and that reminds me of a second piece of music. This one is from a little-known Broadway show called The Light in the Piazza. “Love to Me” expresses how even the universal things are really specific and nuanced in different ways for each of us. The romantic lead of the play sings it to his darling about all of the ways that she means “love” to him just after she has expressed in despair that she can’t imagine how it’s possible.

So, what I described above is what home means to me. Now I am wondering: what is home to you? Would you care to share a bit below?

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Works Cited

Kent, Walter, and James Gannon. “I’ll Be Home For Christmas”. Lyrics. Metro Lyrics. Web. 30 Jan 2015. <http://www.metrolyrics.com/ill-be-home-for-christmas-lyrics-christmas-song.html>

Guettel, Adam. “Love to Me.” The Light in the Piazza: Original Broadway Cast Recording. Perf. Matthew Morrison. Nonesuch Records, 2005. Digital file. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxGnGlYsBEI>