There's No Place Like Home

There's no place like home.

That's an understatement.

I'm a bit of a homebody. As much as I like to travel, explore, sightsee, learn, experience other cultures - I like to be at home just as much. Some days there's nothing better than holing up in front of the TV with Chris and the girls and watching every single one of our Wings DVDs. And after a long day at work, coming home is just what the doctor ordered. In fact, the feeling I get just by walking in the front door of our place after a long day is euphoric. The weight of the stresses of the past few hours instantly lift from my shoulders and I literally sigh with relief.

Home. I'm home.

Since we decided to join forces and make a home of our own, Chris and I have lived in several places. Over the years, we've called several different states "home" - Iowa, Minnesota, Washington... We've felt at home in all of them.

But what makes a home, well, a home?

When I was a little girl, I used to fear the possibility of my parents selling our house. I couldn't imagine being homeless. Because, in my young mind, that's exactly what we would have been. Homeless. Never mind the fact that another house would have immediately been purchased, an apartment rented, or a townhouse leased. That didn't matter. At the time, I truly believed that the only home I could ever have was the one I grew up in. And if we were to ever move, I'd have to leave my cozy bedroom with the yellow walls and the shag green carpet. Would never again see our comfortable - albeit chilly - basement complete with our pop up VCR and red wall paper. There were so many things I'd certainly miss: hearing our toilet mysteriously flush by itself in the middle of the night, the scarred garage door that had taken a beating from my earlier days of pitching softball, the creaky swingset down in the garden that always seemed a bit off kilter... And what about our pool in the backyard? What would I do without that?

To go a step further, I used to spend nights worrying about the day when I finally grew up and had to leave home to start a family of my own. How could the house I shared with my husband ever feel like home? How long would it take me to learn every nook and cranny of the rooms, the yard, the property? And, most importantly, would I ever feel as comfortable in my new house as I did in my old house?

(Did I ever mention that I did wayyyyy too much thinking as a kid? Geesh. Anyway...)

Back then, I believed with all my heart that home was a place. A specific place filled with specific furniture, specific carpet, specific fixtures, specific landscaping, specific sounds, specific smells, specific people... And without the presence of any of those things, home would cease being "home." Instead it would become some strange, uncomfortable, cold, barely inhabitable architectural structure that would leave me feeling empty and out of sorts.

Obviously, the thought of living anywhere but my childhood home used to haunt me a great deal. Pathetic? Yes. But hey, I was a kid. And an overly-emotional one at that.

Fortunately, I grew up. I realized that "home" is more a feeling than an actual place. More a state of mind than a geographically placed stack of bricks and mortar. More about the heart than about the walls.

I will never forget the feeling I got as Chris and I embarked on our most recent move. Our Jeep was packed to the hilt, and as we pulled out of the driveway of our old townhouse back in Minnesota we could hardly contain our excitement. We were heading West, and even though we were technically homeless (we had never been to Washington and blindly sent in a deposit for our new place) I remember feeling a strange sense of calm. Everything that mattered most to me was already in the Jeep: Chris and the dogs. We had the bare essentials and, if worst came to worst, could manage to survive on just that for probably as long as we needed to. In a sense, I was home long before we got to Washington.

It was a crazy-giddy sort of revelation.

I no longer think of home as a place. Like I said before, it's a state of mind. A feeling. And as Chris and I moved around, carving a path through the Midwest and out towards the Pacific Northwest, I've found that the old saying is true. Home is where the heart is.

And there's no place like it.