There’s no place like it

Over the course of the last eight years I taught Legacy Writing at a local community college. Each class format is the same, although I tweak the content based on student feedback. In the first class each year, the participants select and vote on topics for subsequent weeks. This year they chose Dreams, Travel, Risk, Loss and Home. I send out writing prompts a week in advance based on the selected topic for the following class. We will have our last class next Monday on the topic of Home.

This afternoon I sat down to write the prompts for next week’s topic. Home is a topic that often shows up in my own writing, so I gave it lots of thought. I included the straightforward question of “What does the concept of Home mean to you?” I also had questions about how people make a house feel like home, how they make others feel at home in their house and where there are places other than their houses where they feel at home. The prompts are designed to inspire thought and allow participants to take the topic in whatever direction they want.

I’ve never been able to adequately capture what feeling at home means to me. I know what Home isn’t. It isn’t just a house, nor is it a place as in “hometown.” I’ve lived in 13 states and too many houses to count. Some of the houses were homes; others weren’t. My hometown is special to me, but that’s logical since I grew up there and six generations of my family called it home, but I’ve lived in other places that gave me that comfortable feeling. Whether or not a house or place felt like home has little to do with the length of time I lived there or its architectural features, esthetics or landscape either. I’m not clear about what makes me feel at home, but I know that a sense of home is essential to my happiness.

The house I lived in from age 4-16 holds nothing special for me, even though all my siblings were born when we lived in that house and I had many childhood memories there. I add to the list of “nothing special” our first house as a young married couple, our second one where we lived together for 14 years until our divorce, the first house that I bought on my own and redid the kitchen, the houses I lived in for one year each in Delaware and Dallas as a divorced woman, the house where we held our wedding reception when we re-married—all nice comfortable houses, but I always felt like Home was just one move away.

Which ones made the special list? The house that I lived in my last two years of high school and where my parents welcomed my sons for many summers still haunts me as one of my favorites. Also on the list is the single room I rented from an old family friend in Washington state while raw from my divorce, the house we lived in there for ten years after we remarried and my husband retired, our current post-and-beam in the woods of Wisconsin and my little house in Arizona where I sit in the quiet writing this blog post.

As I sort through the characteristics of the houses that I’ve lived in trying to decipher what made some feel like home while others were just a place to live, I know that the special ones were brimming with life—the smell of chicken soup simmering on the stove, the sound of laughter, the shedding of tears, pencil markings on the door jamb, scruffs in the paint that told stories, treasures in the attic. But some of the houses on the “not so special” list had those elements too. I wondered if my feelings for a house were correlated to the amount of blood, sweat and tears shed in the making. Nope. Every house that I owned since I left my parent’s home took work. Their house, that I left when I married, felt like home and I had little to do with the way it looked.

It’s not the houses that were magazine-ready that made my top list either. I used to have house envy. My husband and I drove through old neighborhoods in St. Louis when we were first married imagining what life was like for “real adults” in those houses. We often visited model homes way beyond our reach in Plano Texas. I took my mother-in-law on holiday home tours and tried to envision owning a house worthy of a professional decorator. That envy subsided decades ago when I created my own beautiful—but simple—spaces that fit us just fine. I didn’t need a grand house for it to feel like home. After all, I felt at home in a rented room in Washington state and in my house here where I have a postage stamp-sized lot looking over a concrete block wall to my neighbor’s backyard. I feel at home when I visit my BFF or stay at my brother’s or my sons’ or when I used to eat Sunday dinners at the home of old friends’ in my hometown.

I know that the feeling of home has little to do with a physical structure or location. When I look back over all my residences, I realize that the ones that were most memorable were the places that I lived when I was most comfortable in my own skin and surrounded by people who knew and accepted me as I was. Truth is, I still only have clues to what truly makes me feel at home. I will listen carefully next week when the participants share their stories and hope that they will enlighten me. Understanding my own life by listening to the stories of the participants is one of the gifts in teaching this class and it is why I sign up to do it over and over again.