The saying "Home is where the heart is" always used to confuse me as a child. My heart was in my body, so how could my heart be in my home?
I loved the home in which I grew up. My parents didn't have much, but what they did have, they gave to my sister and I in the best way they could. They gave us their love, their wisdom, and--as all parents do--some of their faults. Our house was small, but it had a yard, in which we had a dog named Bear, and at one point someone gave us a playhouse that my Dad put on stilts and made a wrap-around deck for. I shared a room with my sister until I was about 16, and so I learned how to keep my things neat and understood that having a lot didn't necessarily lead to happiness.
As I got closer to graduating high school, my parents determined that I would need my own room if I wanted to stay home and go to school so that the close proximity of my sister wouldn't drive me mad while I studied late into the night. Instead of moving, my parents decided to build an extension onto the house we lived in. They made the living room bigger by five feet on two walls, lifted the living room's ceiling to 17 feet, and built an office into the side yard. After nearly a year of having people who had trouble speaking basic English bang on the walls, the house was beautiful. It didn't look too much bigger from the street, but once you stepped inside it was gorgeous.
After two years in college, I stayed with some friends of mine for a year. Their house was about the same square footage as my parents' house with the addition, but five people lived there already, two of whom were college graduates, one of which would be graduating high school in a few years, and the other two of whom were their parents. My nine-by-ten foot bedroom turned into a five-by-five foot patch of the living room in which I had an air bed I blew up every night and deflated every morning. It was frustrating sometimes; I had to get up early on weekends I didn't work or go to school because someone else in the household was having people over, or because other people were getting up early to go places and didn't bother staying quiet to let me sleep in. But it was comfortable and safe. I knew I could come back to that house and feel welcome any day.
Then, just before my husband and I got married, he bought the house we now live in. I moved into it before our ceremony. My little air bed stayed inflated through the day, tucked in a corner, suddenly seeming so small in the massive master bedroom. My modest wardrobe, which had before threatened to burst from small plastic containers I had stashed in my friend's living room, now hung freely and spaciously in half of the closet. We had no furniture, and only had a full set of appliances because we had bought some on a super sale and put them on layaway. I ate on the floor. We had my husband's television, but no cable. When I invited my girlfriends over, they were amazed at how empty the house was. But the moment I began moving my things into that beautiful house, it became mine. I didn't care how much or how little my husband and I had. We belonged in that house. All my life I had lived in places that felt warm, welcoming, safe. But never had any of them felt like my house. I was home.
I tried explaining it once to my husband, who fought homesickness for a few weeks after we got married. "This is home, now," I persisted. "This place is our future. I never want to be anywhere else ever again." He stared at me quizzically, as if my face had suddenly turned purple and it amused him. But it was true. I was home. My heart moved into that building the moment I stepped foot in it to start the rest of my life in it. And I never, ever, wanted to leave.
