Home is Not a Place

Home feels so good. In its deepest sense, home is a feeling, not a physical place. It is not where we rest our heads or retire for the day. No. Home is a shelter from storms, an attic of memories.

I am often asked why I never come home. Although I live less than two hours from where I spent my adolescence, home just doesn’t feel the same. In all honesty, that was dad’s home. The place that birthed him. Where his seeds were planted and roots were formed. Sure, I have happy emotions when I think of that place, but those emotions have since been replaced with decades of sadness once dad left this physical world.

I remember our holiday visits home in my younger years, way before dad’s retirement and we relocated there. The long car rides where my sister and I would press our heads to the back of the seat, tilting our gaze at the stars. Or playing eye-spy with the clouds, where our responses were always, “oh yes I see it!” Knowing good and well we didn’t. The gathering of family at my great-grandma’s house for fireworks on the 4th of July – those nights were so magical. Catching lightning-bugs in jars with your cousins, marveling at their luminous glow while dad burned trash in the free-form fire pit. Ugh, those feelings of home can never, ever be erased.

Years later, home was leaving the house and seeing dad working on his car. Returning home hours later to find dad, you guessed it, still working on his car. He loved his cars. Dreaded grass cutting and chores of line-dried laundry. I hate that we had to use the clothesline…WE HAD A DRYER! The jeans would be so stiff, and tees never ever regained their shape! But that’s what we did in our home.

Home was weekend visits with family, where cousins were engulfed in a new made-up game, while aunts and uncles slapped playing cards on the table. The stench and fog of smoke filled the room, literally the entire time. Hey, I’m talking pre-2000s here, adults cared not where they lit up a cig…if you know, you know. Home was balls of snow being lunged at you in the dead of winter, dad in full attack mode with no mercy given. Home was church on Sunday, every Sunday, as a family.

And now, that family is no more. Not fully by the headcount anyway. That physical place of home feels eerie and lonely. Visits to his graveside do not bring me comfort of being close to him, it only erupts feelings of brokenness. After twenty-eight years, that home still brings me such an immense amount of sadness. That physical home. Visits with auntie flashes recollections of his laughter. Old model cars speeding down the roadway mirror his devotion to Cadillacs. While mom’s place symbolizes spaces and doorways he never entered. There are traces of him everywhere, yet no trace of him at all.

My home isn’t defined by walls, addresses, or geography. It is defined by but what I feel when I think of someone. It is emotional safety, a moment of exhale. Know this, a physical house can exist without ever truly feeling like home. And at the same time, you can feel completely at home in a car ride with the right person, in a city you’ve just arrived in, or even within yourself after years of self-discovery.

Your home can change, and trust me, it will. As we grow, heal, grieve, leave relationships, or build new ones, the feeling of home can travel with us. It isn’t locked to the place where we grew up or the space we currently live. Over time I learned home is peace more than it is property. Comfort, more than construction. Connection, more than cardinal coordinates.

We all carry the ability to create home through love, acceptance, and emotional grounding, no matter where we are in the world. So, whenever I feel the need to be close to home, I rely on the feelings of my heart that are safely tucked away. Those of love, joy, wildness and remembrance. The scents of seasons and music of memories. Always remember, home will not be found on a map. But a compass will lead you there.