Home is....Where?

All of this moving around has gotten me to thinking: where exactly is my "home?"  They say that home is where the heart is, and I suppose that's true, but when you've moved around as much as I have, it causes you to take a step back and think through the issue.


I grew up in Jacksonville, Florida, but left home at 18 for college, and never moved back. For a while, my parents still lived in the house in which I spent my teenage years, so I still considered Jacksonville (and that house, in particular) "home," and would visit there at the holidays and during summer break. My parents moved out of that house, though, somewhere along the way, and moved across town. At that point, going to their house still felt like home, but not quite in the same way. After college, I went to law school, and then moved to Atlanta, where I met my husband. We lived in Atlanta for a while, had one baby there, then moved to New Jersey, where we had two more babies. From New Jersey, we moved to Nashville. In the meantime, my sister and my parents had moved to Nashville, so we were all transplanted -- and reunited -- in Nashville.

I should probably mention that in each of the three cities in which we lived, we had multiple homes. Two houses in each place, so six houses in all, over a period of about 14 years. Each of those houses felt like home while we lived in them, but I don't associate any one of them, in particular, with the notion of "home."

After five years in Nashville, we moved to Serbia, where we lived a gloriously simple life in a beautiful house in a really nice neighborhood. Serbia became home for us during the 17 months that we lived here.

To complicate matters even further, when we moved away from Nashville, we kept the house that we owned, but rented it out. We had our second set of renters in the house when we decided to return to the States, and did not feel right about asking them to move out (they had just relocated their family of 5 from Indiana). And so we ourselves went on the hunt for a rental home. We are now living in someone else's home (renting) not far from our other home, and while it definitely didn't feel like "home" for the first few days, we're starting to settle in and feel good about being here.

One of my dear friends recently write about this phenomenon (not being real sure about where "home" is) on her blog. She and her husband and two kids recently took a mid-life plunge into the foreign service, and lived in Belgrade while we were there. I loved how she articulated her thoughts on this question of home in her blog, and she kindly gave me permission to reprint part of her post on my blog:

Finally, we went back to our old town, Peoria, where we lived for five & a half years before beginning this adventure. We had a bbq and saw many old friends. That was just fantastic. It kind of confused me, too. It felt like I was coming home. But Chicago felt that way, too. But our things are in Belgrade and so is the house we live in and the schools my kids go to. I said to my friend Beverly, I don't know where home is right now. And she said the wisest thing anyone could have at that moment: Home is where you are.

It was a beautiful, summer day when we landed in Belgrade. I was so happy to be back I started questioning my very being: were my ancestors really Balkan? Was I an old, Balkan baba in a past life? Whatever the reason why, it is a great feeling to be home again.

Thanks, Regina (Landor, that is -- look for her in bookstores soon; she's a budding author!). I suppose her friend is right -- home is where you are, and here we are in Nashville, so we're home, for now.