Archive for July, 2007

Home is where the heart is…

July 11th, 2007 | Josie

Where we love is home,Home that our feet may leave, but not our hearts.~Oliver Wendell Holmes

I have spent the past 20 years moving from house to house, city to city, and, more recently, country to country. People assume that I must have hated growing up this way, that it must have been hard never having a real “home.” The thing is that I never once in my childhood considered myself to being missing out on the home experience. Every time we moved, I felt at home within days of moving into the new house. I learned at an early age that, for me at least, the old adage holds true: “home is where the heart is.” Growing up, home was always where my family was, wherever that was. Even now that I am grown and no longer living with my family, home to me is where I keep the things most precious to me: pictures of my sisters, trinkets from my mom, memories of growing up. I can also feel at home in more than one place. Part of my heart will always be at home in the house that my parents live in, even if I have never really lived there myself. Other parts of me will feel at home in the apartment that I currently live in, while still other parts belong exclusively to the places I love best, residing with the people I love most in this world.My return to the U.S. has been an interesting one, one marked by moving. Not only have I moved back, but I began the hunt for an apartment almost immediately. On top of my own imminent relocation is the fact that my parents and sisters are moving as well. The last week and a half has been a flurry of boxes and packing and moving trucks. It has been both stressful and convenient to move at the same time as my parents. Stressful in the fact that there is much to separated between my things and theirs and that we have to move their things in one direction and mine in another, but also nice in that there are things that I need that will not go well in their new house, or that they need to replace anyways.I have always thought of moving and packing as a chance to reorganize and cleanse. When you move, all of the clutter and mess gets weeded out, thrown away, and a newly unpacked room is pristine and perfect. I am not always a terribly neat person, as anyone that has ever lived with me for any length of time can attest to. I don’t like to do the dishes, and I am a firm believer that, contrary to popular belief, your bedroom floor can, in fact, serve double duty as a closet. Despite that, I like to live in clean spaces every once in a while, and I have spent my life rearranging my room entirely every couple of months, just to feel like things have changed. I think that I thrive on that change. It energizes me in a way that nothing else really can, much to the frustration of my college roommate when I informed her at eleven o’clock at night that I had to move the room around immediately. New places and new ways of looking at things make me feel most alive.

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