#8 When home stops being a place

How losing my childhood sense of home helped me build a deeper one rooted in people, presence, and memory.

All I see is red.

Mom hands me a box to unpack and I throw objects, toss papers, bark orders.

My parents have moved hundreds of miles away from everything that is familiar to me. New house. New streets. New restaurants.

I’m trying to be supportive, but it hurts too much. I push down tears, but anger boils over. I’m ‘sad mad,’ but I don’t understand that yet. Nor do my parents. What’s gotten into you? they ask.

It’s 2002 and I’m stumbling through the first year out of college. Rudderless and without a vision for what’s next, my parents up and move from Nashville to Cincinnati.

We’d moved out of my childhood home years before, but my parents stayed in town, so I could still ‘come home.’

Now, every sense of home is gone.

When we’re young home is a structure. A place with walls, a foundation and roof. If we’re lucky, it’s also a refuge, a place to rest. And a place to be exactly who you are.

But as you age you realize home becomes less of a place and more of a feeling. It has to as you stretch and climb out of your comfort zone.

I’ve been thinking a lot about home lately and where exactly that is. The other day I drew a timeline and realized I’ve lived Boston for as long as I lived in Tennessee. Which means I’ve spent half of my life in New England.

For a girl from the south who still says y’all, that realization hits hard.

Where are you from? Nashville

Where is home? Boston (or rather a town outside of)

But is Boston truly home?

I don’t think so.

This place where I write these words? The porch I sit on where I hear children’s laughter echoing nearby and a hummingbird hum while flying up for a drink of sugar water? They are but a temporary stop along the way.

One day too soon from now my children will leave, and just like when I was a child, we’ll not need all this space. And then it will be time for my children to feel the ache of good-bye, of being unmoored and discovering how you can be separate from but also forever part of a place.

Where is home?

Home is in the laughter we share, the stories we tell, the struggles we overcome.

Home is a collection of memories you take with you.

Home is my husband and children. Wherever they are, I am home.