After reading various home stories from my intriguing classmates (available here), here is the list of things I noticed:

Departure: the act of leaving home was almost always present in these stories. The fluidity of the term home perhaps starts here as one place or thing that can be left for another home. Simultaneous senses of home can exist together but one must always physically or mentally be in one idea when referring to it as home.

Destination: home was a place to arrive at, or to aspire for in many stories. It seemed to exist as an ideal, but an ideal that was loosely defined, existing at the limits of language, between the tangible and the imagined.

People: one would be hard pressed to find a home story that does not describe the people associated with that home, or perhaps necessary for that physical place to attain the term home; mothers, fathers, sisters, friends, support groups, movements, seem to all be worthy of being a home.

Animals/Nature: whether the actual environment or a horse one lives above , home came beside descriptions of living non-human creatures and landscapes. Home takes up both the transient living environment and the permanent, once again existing at a tension as in home being the place you leave and the place you arrive at. Emotions attached themselves to nature and then through those images of nature emotions became a part of the physical place.

Identity: home helps us understand who we are. Place helps us see what we are in relationship to it as Kaylie points out: 

It is the connection to this place—watching the waves role in and out with my breath—and the recognition of the connections between the living beings here, and between this life and this place. It is recognizing how I fit into this picture.

Home as a means for identity both hurt and bolstered many storytellers. Home put down constraints as a place where one was meant to feel safe, but if this meaning failed one was left disoriented. These constraints such as relationships, physical place, and other social identifiers could help though, giving people a sense of grounding.

Ineffable: The language of home seems to fail at its origin because it exists as a place one leaves and a place one returns to, as both the people and nature that inhabit it, as the identity one sheds and the identity one embraces. Home comes with contradiction. Storytellers reflected on childhood homes, some happy, some not, but those homes seemed to belong in childhood, and now there was a space to be filled by a different home. Home then changes but also grounds us.

What I’ve been trying to get at, but perhaps not well enough, through this list is that home is our “Believe it and not” challenge that J. Edward Chamberlin presents early on in his struggle with how to make sense of the word home when its definition contradicts between almost every individual (34). The term comes from  Paul Veyne’s response to the question of whether the ancient Greeks actually believed their myths or not, but it is equally applicable to our conceptions of home. We both believe in it as a destination and a place we are in right now.

Finally, the act of believing implicitly attaches itself to home with every  individualized conception of the word. To simply utter “home” becomes an action of the imagination, throwing us forward and backwards in time, urging us to analyze our current home, and escaping our tongues as we try to define what home means as we approach it, like the limits of Calculus.

Work Cited:

Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories?: Finding Common Ground. Vintage Canada Ed., Vintage Canada, 2004.