Home

 

If you had asked me before this week, where is home? I probably would have given you some trite answer like home is where the heart is.

For most of my life home was where my parents were. We moved a lot, but home was always quickly accepted as the place our family lived and even after I no longer lived there, I still thought of it as home, so for me, home has been a house long since demolished by a angry woman after her daughter, my mother died. It did not exist except in my mind, but it still usurped all the other places that might have been called, home.

I thought of those other places as Caroline's house, John's house, Bobby's house, Jimmy's house. The turmoil in my own house kept it from ever feeling like the safe, nonjudgmental place I wanted my children to call home. I was constantly looking for that, always hoping to find it in a place with a family room, or a pool, or by a lake, but it was never really there. The possibility that it could be ripped from under us made it disposable.

Those last few years were a frenetic search for a place that could not exist and so I had never really given it any more thought until today. Today I realized that although this is the fourth year in the fourth apartment I have lived in back here in Bloomington-Normal, it is really my home!

I feel safe here. I am at home here. The decor is mine. The furniture is mine. The books are mine and I am in a place I love. When my daughter comes to visit in a few weeks, she will be coming home. Maybe not to her home, where she grew up, or where she lives now, but to me and the place I call home.