Home. It has been said that home is where the heart is. If that is true, a lot of places over the last 8 years have been home. Others think that home is where your stuff is, or more accurately where you live. Well there is a lot of stuff here, piles of it in fact. A portion of it is all boxed up and waiting for a more permanent move. So maybe that is why I don’t think that is a good definition. Maybe a better definition is that home is where you make it. Over the last number of years, home has been many places - upstate NY, Lynchburg, VA, Hawaii, Germany, Asheville, NC, Speculator, NY, and most recently Newington, CT. Some places I have lived a few years, some places a few months, or even just a week. Yet I have left piece of my heart in each place.
All during my growing up years, I lived in one house. Vacationed primarily in one place, and was never really away from my parents more than a couple nights at a time. Then comes high school. My parents started going out on car shows and I’d be home alone on the weekends, or for longer trips my grandmother came and stayed with me. Then, I started working at a camp for a couple of the summers. My father’s day present was that I was leaving for the next 9 weeks....Only to come home again at the end of the summer. College comes around and things change, big time! I went away to school, came home for Thanksgiving and Christmas break, back down to school for a semester (traveling to Belarus for spring break), home for a couple days, then off to work at another camp, then back to school, then home at christmas, back to school (myrtle beach for spring break), then I stayed in VA for the summer, back home at Christmas, back at school (Hawaii for spring break this year), then camp, and school, home at thanksgiving because I went to Germany for a month over Christmas break, back at school, then camp again, then grad school. After grad school I moved to NC for what was supposed to be 15 months... 7 months later I moved home to NY where I was for two years, spending both summers at camp. Then I did an internship in CT which I just finished and am back in NY again.
Needless to say, the idea of going home has very different meanings, depending on where I am. Am I going back to the address on my drivers license? Or am I going back to wherever I currently reside at the time? Sure, my stuff may be here, but when all I see are boxes pilled up of things that are waiting for me to have some semi permanent digs, it’s hard to call this place home. My heart longs for every and any other place I have lived. Sometimes this place seems more like a cell that I am confined to for the time being than home.
