Home

It's a funny word: home. What does it really mean? In high school, when I lived with my parents my home was our house. It was the place that I ate, slept, and did homework. I lived there for about eleven years. Then they sold it. And I realized that I really didn't miss it at all. This was, however, early on in my college career, during which I moved quite frequently. So, this place that I thought was home could really not have felt too much like home if I don't even miss it. To me, it's just a house.

The reason this has been on my mind is because so many people have asked me if I was going home for the holidays. And, well, I can't really say yes because I have never lived in the house that I go to, but at the same time I am going to my parents house to be with my family. So I usually just say I am going to spend time with my family up north. And that works... for Minnesotans who know what "up north" is...
Everybody else just asks more questions and then they get the long answer...

So, basically what I am saying is that often I don't feel like I have that Home. Not the physical place that you walk into and take a deep breath and relax knowing that you are in a safe comfortable place.
As with all college student, or people of the same age, separating from your parents is a difficult and emotional task. I would think that most people my age don't feel like they have a home.
We move from apartment to apartment, trying to save money on rent so that one day, maybe, we can get that house and raise a few kids. Then we would have a home.
But for now, for me, it is that in between stage of moving from horrible to worse.
Not that all of my living situations have been bad, most have been just less than ideal.
Dorm room...couldn't do it. Sharing a bathroom with twenty other girls, or just being around three times that many girls that live on the same floor who always want to gossip about who did what and blah blah blah... no thank you! That was a short-live three month failed experiment.
Then there was the moving back in with my parents for a short while... but they were also in the transition of moving to a new house and trying to sell the old house, which they did, a week or two before my lease started on my next apartment...
Couch surfing... always a fail safe where having a lot of friends comes in handy, as long as you don't mind using your car as a closet.
First real apartment... wow, what a nice place. Seriously, it was close to where I worked, I could afford it until lack of sleep made me crazy and I had to quit my job, then it was a stretch. Downside... they started construction shortly after we moved in that lasted until we moved out. Two cute girls living in a ground floor apartment... where do you think the construction workers set up camp?
Next was a pretty awesome deal. My mom needed a place to stay in the cities for a few nights a week, and a friend of hers was trying to sell this huge condo/townhouse/whatever and it was going pretty slow. So they let us rent it. My mom was barely there so I got the master bedroom with the separate bathroom and walk in closet, and even a separate vanity with two sinks... :) fireplace in the living room, decent kitchen, all new(ish) appliances, and (get this) a garage! Other than it looking like an old lady lived there, it was the perfect house. My mom and I had to decide if we should redecorate or leave all thirty vases of fake flowers up, along with the flower curtains and wicker furniture... we left most of it, (we didn't want to make it look soooo good that someone would buy it right away!
Once that deal was done, I did some more couch surfing, but only for a short period of time.
Then I moved in with a friend of my sister, who I think was the best roommate ever. And I love her 30lbs cat! The only thing that went wrong there was a broken water pipe in the wall of my closet that leaked out into the carpet, but only after leaving extreme amounts of black mold soaked through the wall.... while she was in Mexico. It was quite the experience, but was solved rather quickly.
Now I am living in a tiny apartment that I cannot even describe without veins popping out of my forehead. Lets just say things like to go wrong, and I will be a very picky apartment shopper from now on!
But still, none of these were ever home. They were always some temporary space to sleep and stash my crap. Since my first apartment, I have not had enough space to have all of my belongings. I know I have a lot of just crap. But its crap that I love. My hundreds of books, all my art supplies, my art desk! these are things that I want in my apartment. But that won't happen anytime soon. And I'm not sure that having all that will make where I live feel anymore like home.
SO here is the cliche now... Home is where the heart is. Home is being with the one's you love. So much of this is based on a wonderful song called home, by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeroes, which you can play below...
"home is wherever I'm with you"
this is Jonathan and my new favorite song! I think it suits us well, even though it is a bunch of hippies singing it ! :) :)