Where Is Home?

My family moved from here to there as I grew, and while it never felt like we were nomads, the question still arose.  Each new home of ours was within the same five-to-ten mile radius as the one previous, and in that subconscious way of maintaining normalcy, we remained customers of the same grocery store.  The look of the neighborhood may change, but we'd be damned if we'd go to a new store and get lost looking for food.

We stayed in each house long enough for me to develop thick, knotted friendships, to feel like this place was uniquely mine, and to attach a distinct identity to each time.  One recent night, I drove slowly through each of those neighborhoods of memory, gliding past the yellow-orange porch lights dangling on the fronts of those containers of my youth.  And it felt very, very strange.

Experiencing memory in the places they were born immediately feels like one massive cliche.  Once I was able to accept what was happening and sift through all of the scenes from film and television that have recreated such a trip, the connection to these places felt familiar yet...remote.  I watched the football games we played in the street, felt the bloody rips in my hands and knees and elbows as I tumbled to the asphalt.  A tornado howled beyond my neighbor's fence.  The concrete was warm against my legs in summer as we sat in driveways and traded baseball cards.  Walking home from school, kicking rocks, strolling up the gentle hill to the snack and cartoons that were inside the house.  The girl next door.  Everything.

Eventually, I pulled back from it all and drove away wondering, Was that my home?  Or was it this one?  It wasn't all of them, I knew.  'Home' felt like a singular term.  Some had it easier, I thought.  They grew up in another city, and were forever a part of its culture, regardless of the address on the front of their house.  That city was home.  Others grew within the walls of the same house for their entire lives, and identified with that place.  I thought it over as I drove through the frost, and it caught in my head:  Home is about finding a constant.  A place that feels completely familiar to your heart, regardless of the names on the street signs.  Home, therefore, can be just about anything.  A city, a house, a school, a career, or in my case, a person.

Realizing that my home was not somewhere, but someone, made me smile at the resolution of it all.  The fog crept up the windshield from my breath and snatched me from the daydreaming.  I switched the heater over to defrost, once again irritated that winter still held everything beyond captive in the goddamn cold.