Still unpacking boxes, trying to “find a home” for our stuff.  Home.  I am wondering if this will ever be Home.

What makes a place Home?  Does physical custody and containment of my stuff in this apartment make this Home?  I think not.  I would say that this is where I am staying (some people actually use the phrase “I stay in X town” when asked where they live).  It doesn’t feel permanent. Doesn’t feel stable.  It’s like the air around a hot grill – wavy and watery, as if everything you see through it is not quite real and could disappear at any moment.

Our culture has many sayings about Home.  “Home is where the heart is.”  “Home is where you make it.”  So far, I haven’t made a home here (I think that takes more than two days), nor is it where my heart is (I think that might take forever).

To me, Home is a concept, an idea.  Like Love, it is impossible to adequately define; words cannot capture its truth.  Home is your history, your memories. It’s a sense of connectedness. It’s a thing you build in a place you choose, a place where you feel grounded, safe, and untouchable. Like in baseball, home plate is what you run for, the point of the game.  Even in the kid’s game of “tag,” there is the notion of “home:”  You run away, but not too far because you need to get back there to be safe;  you run, but you don’t ever want to lose sight of it.  That’s what Home is.  It isn’t so much a “where;”  it’s a “what.”  My Mom always said “You can’t go home again.”  As a child I didn’t understand what this meant.  But I learned.  It means that when you leave a home, you leave Home.  And that Home as you know it, that concept, that essence leaves with you, as a soul leaves a body when the life inside it ends.

By leaving my Home,  I burst the bubble.  I broke the spell.  I can return to that physical place, but it won’t be the same because it is already changed simply by the act of my leaving.  And that act has changed me,  too.  It has taken my breath away. It has numbed my soul.   It has stopped my heart beating.