Like most animals we have a sense of home. It is (or should be) the place where we feel the most safe and comfortable. It is where we maintain ourselves and prepare to face the world.
But it is more complex than that. Home is more than just the building that you now reside in. It is also the larger community. Choosing a place to live is also about the neighborhood and the town (or region for country dwellers).
It can even be a particular person or persons that make a place “home”.
Some of us live far from the place we feel is most “home” for us, or maybe it doesn’t exist anymore. And some never had a place that felt completely like home.
Then there are those who have a deep and clear attachment to ancestral land. Either that they inhabit still, like many here in my town of Taos, or that they remember in song and story, like my Tongan friend.
The Taos Pueblo has been continuously occupied for 1000 years. And my Tongan friend sang songs from 1000 years ago, the meaning long forgotten, but hearkening back to the homeland. I can’t imagine having roots that deep.
It occurs to me I should answer my own question. My childhood home was not happy, but I still have an attachment to it, and to New York, both the city and upstate. But I spent a number of years rootless.
The place I lived longest was Sonoma County, CA, and that is the location of the house that came to represent home to me. It is that house that illustrates this essay above.
Where I live now, I own my little slice of Mesa. It IS my home and I am responsible for everything within it. I am a “local” in Taos, but it will never be home to me the way it is to the generational Taoseños. It is not my ancestral land. I do feel comfortable here though, and it seems I am going to stay awhile…
What is home to you? Do you have conflicts, such as loving the neighborhood but hating your house? Or vice versa? Does your feeling of home rest in your partner or family? Do you have ancestral lands that you can pinpoint on a map, and if so, do you still live there? Is the place you live now “home”?
Growing up, home was wherever the Navy posted my father, wherever my mother did her rapid nesting. I made Home in Princeton, a 1911 house I spent seven years restoring. I sold it after a divorce, to fund my go at a solo return to Manhattan. On the day Trump destroyed the Bonwit friezes, one of the Bandaid Johnson's bulldozed the Princeton Home—he only wanted the lot. Years later, I built Home from scratch, on an island north of Seattle. https://www.annmedlock.com/building-with-christopher-alexander