Home

Something a friend said the other day made me reflect on the idea of "home". This friend had just moved here from another country with her husband, found an apartment and was busy unpacking and trying to fit her past life into her new space. As new as she was, with boxes still unpacked, furniture still unbought, she said in an email that she and her husband got "home" about midnight one night. Even being in a new city, which she had previously only visited upon occasion, with no other family in the country, she called her new apartment "home".

I think a lot about the whole notion of home, and what it means to different people. What makes a place "home"? When do you feel "at home"? Is home truly where the heart is? I grew up in one place: Denver, Colorado. I didn't leave, other than for vacations, until I went away to college. Since graduating, I have lived in thirteen different homes. Those thirteen homes were in seven different countries. My son, who is now thirteen, lived in eight different homes, in five different countries, before he became a teenager.

Very often, in my peregrinations, I have felt very alien, out-of-place, whatever the opposite of "feeling at home" is. And then one day I realize that, when I wasn't paying attention, this strange new world -- whether it was Warsaw, Palermo, Rangoon, Havana, Lima, or San Jose -- had somehow become home. That transition from feeling like a stranger in a strange land to someone who belongs can come from showing a visiting friend or relative around and realizing you know what you're talking about and where you're going. It can come from finding a pediatrician, a dentist, a car mechanic, a new group of friends...from forging a support structure in an increasingly familiar environment.

Feeling at home, well, at home, is easier. I unpack boxes -- often knowing from the smell as I open them what country the contents are from -- uncovering all the treasures and memories from my previous "homes", then create a new home by combining all those treasures in new ways, on new walls, in different rooms, constructing a new life. I have become very adept at this process, particularly if I have seen photos of my new house in advance; I daydream a lot and figure out where a lot of our things belong, and then it is just a matter of unpacking them and putting them in "their place". I own no home but, in a very short time, can turn an empty, rented house into a place where my family has lived, perhaps, for generations.