'HOME'

I’ve been wondering about the idea of home lately. What is it? Is it a person? A place? A thing? I don’t mean the place where you live, that’s just a dwelling. I mean the feeling of being home. Of course that might be the building you live in. Maybe it called to you when you saw it. Maybe when you first walked in you felt comfortable, and right, and home. Or maybe it’s just the place where you keep your stuff.

Is it the place you grew up? Or the house you felt most comfortable in when you were a child. Certainly that’s one kind of home. But surely that’s the kind you grow out of. Maybe you come back to it every once in a while, but it never quite feels like it did back when you lived there. Maybe it’s the town you lived in as a kid. Or the one you lived in the longest. Or even where you went to college. But it seems to me that those are past homes. The kind that are populated by memories. You can go back and visit, but you always see it through the lens of the past. Without the same people and the same situations, it’s not quite home. At least not for you. It belongs to a new group of people now.

So then is it the people that make up a home? Can a single person be ‘home’? Enough so that it doesn’t matter where you are, as long as that other person is with you it feels like home? That seems like an awful lot of pressure to put on that other person, but that’s probably a different topic entirely.

Is ‘home’ just the place where you feel the most comfortable? The place where it’s safe to let your guard down and relax. Or is it more than that? Can there be more than one place at a time that feels like home? Or can there only be one place that is your true home at a time? Certainly it can and does change throughout life, but can there really be more than one at a time? Would having two dilute the feeling, as someone suggested to me, or would that just make you incredibly lucky? Or maybe that’s only an option if you have multiple personalities.

Can you make a home? Can something start out as a place you exist in, and then turn into something else? Can ‘home’ be created or forced?

If you never leave the town you grew up in, does that just mean you were really lucky? That you recognized from the beginning what home meant to you and you were lucky enough to always exist there. Or does that just mean you never ventured further and explored the idea, and have therefore accepted where you are as the best that you care to do?

I’ve lived in many different places, less than some people and more than most. Our house on 87th street in Milwaukee felt like home when I was a kid, but I think that was mostly because I couldn’t remember ever being anywhere else. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, to be completely honest. Until we moved. The few random places we lived before we moved to Waukesha were little more than space holders. I fought letting Waukesha become home for a long time. It was a long time before I was comfortable in the house, much longer before I was comfortable in the town, and never comfortable with myself the entire time I lived there. I’m pretty sure the last part has more to do with the nature of adolescence than anything else. Eventually I guess it became home and, by virtue of the fact that my parents still live there, when I go home for vacation, that’s where I’m going. Madison was never home, and I didn’t stay there very long. Duluth was more comfortable, and I have it to thank for at least one of my best friends, but it was still too transitory to be home. Milwaukee as a city has always felt somewhat homey, but that might just be because I know it so well that I’m comfortable there. Certainly none of the myriad of random apartments that I lived in were home in any way. I used to say that Milwaukee/Waukesha was the home I was given, and Minneapolis was the home I made for myself. And despite the fact that I didn’t live in Minneapolis very long, there is something about it that feels home like to me. But when I say I’m going home to Minneapolis, it means I’m going to see Erik, Miranda, Sig, Cathy, Missy, Mother and Father Edison, etc. So while I know the town well still, and feel extremely comfortable there, it’s the people that really make it something close to home. Los Angeles has never been home, even though I’ve lived here longer than anywhere else in my adult life. It came close for awhile, but I’ve never felt like I belonged here, not really.

Looking back on all of this I think that maybe I’ve been searching for ‘home’ my entire adult life. I don’t know if I’m looking for a city, a house, an apartment, a person, a job, or what. All I know is I haven’t found anything yet that says to me “This is it, you can relax, you‘re home now.” But I truly believe that it’s out there somewhere. So I guess I’ll just keep looking.