The Elusive Meaning of Home
11 definitions of home from you, fellow Substackers - plus my own take in the form of an essay.
Four months living in America, at the foot of the Appalachian mountains, and I felt like I was taking up a new identity.
I had gone there on a one-way plane ticket and by December 2005 I was morphing into an American college grad student. So when a surprise plane ticket from my shockingly generous host family to go back home for Christmas landed in my lap, I didn’t know how to take it. I had been working hard on making a home in America, and now I had the opportunity to travel back home. Home eastbound, to a place I had left not planning to return any time soon. The emotion of going home mixed with the excitement of taking my second ever trans-Atlantic flight made this an unforgettable memory.
Home.
A concept as unique as each of us is. What home means to me might not mean the same to you. Some people think of a place. Others feel a strong emotion. Many think of their parents or siblings. A few don’t want to think of it at all.
And yet, during the dark winter months, especially during the darkest point, around the winter solstice, we all hear a calling to go closer to whatever home means for each of us. Like a flock of sheep returning home at dusk. For shelter, for warmth, for food. It’s that simple. It’s the bottom of the pyramid of needs.
“The wind is a home, as I grew up somewhere very windy, likewise with the shore and ocean beyond. The scent of salt in the air, the rich decay of an old forest, the bark of a deer, the song of a seal. The chanting of monks, punctuated by bells, the cacophony of dogs every dawn. All these are home.” — Alexander M Crow
I asked a few of you here on Notes what home means to you.
The answers are fascinating, endearing and even hilarious.
“All the places where I have left my heart are home to me”, says Rachel Shenk
Charlie Becker, paraphrasing the American poet Robert Frost, thinks “home is the place where, when you go, they can’t turn you away”. Reading that feels so comforting.
This is one to reflect on from
: “All I can do is drown and surrender to the ocean, a place that connects rather than separates people and cultures — and probably the only home for me and many others who have no home in this world.”Michael Jensen said “home is wherever Brent is”, just like Dan Stocke: “Home is wherever my wife is.” I find these statements some of the most profound of all. The feeling of home inside your body is given by a true communion with another human being, a love that feels like home.
Mitch Boucher paints a beautiful picture, here are a few words: “I think of home as a place where I can be safe physically, mentally, and emotionally; where I can lay bare my sorrows and fears…. Home is a place where I can eat and sleep without one eye open”.
“The goal is to come home” — Wryd Smythe
Home is definitely something inside each of us, it’s our heart’s own comfort plush toy that we grab tight when we need it. Bella Hathaway says it nicely: “I only hope that I become good at taking “home” and that feeling with me wherever I go”.
R. S. Hampton contemplates on this too: “I need to experience something that feels a lot like hope—not just the comfortable feeling of being in a familiar location but the sudden surge of happiness and contentment.”
But probably one of the most poetic ways to describe a home was generously offered to me by Alexander M Crow: “The wind is a home, as I grew up somewhere very windy, likewise with the shore and ocean beyond. The scent of salt in the air, the rich decay of an old forest, the bark of a deer, the song of a seal. The chanting of monks, punctuated by bells, the cacophony of dogs every dawn. All these are home.”
As intangible and elusive as it is, home enters us through our pores, it invades all our senses and inhabits our bodies in a unique kind of way.
In a candid and truthful style, Barbs Honeycutt brings some lightheartedness to this complex topic: “To me, home is where my makeup brushes are.” I mean, right?! Whether it’s makeup brushes or painting brushes, favorite coffee mug or favorite people — home is where our favorite stuff is.
And finally, Wryd Smythe raised my attention to baseball, a game in which “the goal is to come home”. Enough said.
Nineteen years after that gift plane ticket brought me home to Romania, this year I undertook a similar trip. ‘Home’ was a layered concept this time, just as elusive but also just as tangible some days:
Going home. Coming home.
✈️ You board a plane from an airline you don’t want to fly with, but the love of your father is stronger than your resistance to fly with them.
🚌 You then take a minibus on a road you’re afraid to be on, for the missing highways and safety you’re now used to. But the love for the ones you’re going towards is bigger.
🏡 You enter the house where you lived your tender years, full of tension, strangeness and pain. And also full of the scent of winter dishes on the stove, of good memories, full of familiarity.
Family. It’s the famili—arity among the people who make it up.
🏙️ You walk the streets of the city that was once your whole world. It is frozen in time. No storefront door changed, no painting on walls renewed, no flowers in the park reborn. Only the Danube has grown an island in its middle from its bowels. The museum of the city that once was. But, it is now too. Present and past overlap and you are stuck between the two.
🏫 You walk by your old high school and linger like a madwoman in front of the gate for longer than decent. Bus drivers stop by, unsure if you’re waiting to hop on. Locals walk by, heads tucked down low between their shoulders to bypass the winter chill, confused as to why you just stand there. You felt safe in this building. High school was more home than at home. You stand and take it all in, trying to reach back into your past and connect it to the present moment. The museum of the city that once was.
❄️ You hurry to step out of the flat when it starts snowing. You haven’t seen snow flurries in a year, at least. You walk pointing your chin to the grey sky to receive the cold flakes on your face. Just like when you were a kid, walking the same streets, scarf compulsorily over your mouth then.
🧸 You pass by the building that was your kindergarten, feeling like a giant now. The concrete slide, still painted in the same intense blue, now chipped in several parts. Can paint last this long?, you wonder. You stop at the end of the alley, in a corner. A corner you dreamt of many, many times. That recurrent dream when daddy was on one side of the alley, and you on the other, a hole gaping between you two. A hole too big for the child you to hop over and reach him. Now, you stroll by that dreamt hole, arm in arm with your aging father, now both of you old enough to close the gap between you two.
🥨 You go to your favorite pretzel store to buy a childhood pretzel topped with poppy seeds. The place smells exactly the same as it did 30 years ago, and 40 too. The first bite of the sweet, crunchy dough is set off by the salted poppy seeds sticking on your tongue. The museum of the city that once was.
🫂 Before returning to your present life, you give them each a hug. You hug your mother, putting the hurt and pain on pause, in that long second. You hug your father next, a little longer, but also in a hurry. You never hug them long enough. The bus would be long gone by the time you finished.
❤️ On your way back, you cry for a few hours straight. Tears of separation, tears you remember crying 20 years ago when you first left too. Tears of fear of how you’d find them next. Tears that make up the road of being a permanent foreigner.
I’ll leave you with my favorite Christmas song — even though it’s January already:
Home is certainly a layered concept, Monica, and your essay was wonderfully evocative.
I left my birth country permanently in 1993 and was never considered an ex-pat anywhere thereafter. A foreigner, yes. A migrant, sometimes. Looking for "home," often. I am still not sure where that is.
Damn it Monica, this hits right "home".
All the feelings you describe, all the ups and downs of going back where you grew up.
What is even weirder is that I find myself agreeing with multiple of the descriptions from your readers, even though they do not agree with each other. Like a mild form of schizophrenia.
For instance, I consider both Denmark and Greece to be my homes. And I agree with Charlie Becker's definition (a place where they cannot turn you away). At the same time though, I have heard multiple times the phrase "well what do you care, you don't leave here anymore". Isn't that a kind of rejection? And if so, does it mean I should not agree with Charlie? Or that if I do agree, Greece is not really my home?
Very difficult topic and you did a great job tackling it.