Home (Is Where the Heart Is)

Home. The place where you feel safest, the place that you can always return to. A home by definition is a permanent location. However, where one decides to designate one's home to be is a personal decision. Some may say their home is where they live currently, where their family lives, where their love resides, or they may have multiple homes. Regardless of where one considers their home to be, most individuals have some place that they will call their home, a place to find comfort.

As a child, home to me was both the place I lived, returned to every day after school, and where my family lived. I would be invited over to friends' homes and they would come to my home. There was no doubt as to where I called home. If I didn't feel comfortable or wanted to go somewhere, that place was always back home, where I was sure I would be safe. When I played games when I was young, it was taken for granted that certain areas were called home. In a game of tag, home base was always the place where you were invulnerable to being tagged. In addition to games, proper sports use the concept of home as well. Home base in baseball is the place where you ultimately want to get to, the only way to score runs. The entire point of the game is to get to "home". Sports games played on a team's own turf is called a "home game". And then, in American high school, the first home game of a school's football team is celebrated as "Homecoming".

Now that I'm older and have traveled and lived other places, home has taken on a different meaning. I have family in Germany, and when I visit there, I would consider my grandparents house a home. However, when I am not there, even though I know its a place where I have family and will be safe, I consider it more a place to visit than a home. At times, when in another place or traveling, we humans miss the place we consider home so much that we call ourselves "homesick". I know that, however comfortable I feel at times in a different place, I still have feelings of homesickness, though it does not affect me as much as it does others. One can also be homesick when one doesn't have a place they can call home, as the Kings of Convenience are: "Homesick / cause I know longer know / where home is."

Right now, I am in a situation where I could regard several places as my home. I attend a school in India, where I live and have done so for the majority of the past year and a half. My corner in my room is spacious and has a bed and a desk, and though its obviously less than at my house back in Wisconsin, it is without a doubt mine. After classes I hear myself asking my housemates "Are you going home now?" Having just returned from a week away in the Himalayas, I felt as if I had come back to a familiar, safe, and special place when I arrived back on campus. Yet when I talk about winter break and going to to live in the house I did before I came here, the place where my parents still live, I will say "I'm going home this winter," without giving it a second thought.

And then I have yet another place where I call home, but that place keeps changing. Right now it's in upstate New York, but its constantly moving. This home used to be with me here in India as well, and it was also in Chicago for a while over the summer. Sometimes this home is in places where I've never been myself. When I finally reach this home again the next, it will be when I go to Mexico, and am able to see my love again. Although there are many places I can say that "I feel at home", I ultimately feel that home is where the heart is, just as the group Peter, Paul & Mary sang out back in the sixties. In general, though, home should simply be the place where you feel the safest, the place that you can always rely on to harbor you and provide you with comfort.