Home Is Where?

I carry home like a burden. A place I need to arrive at, somewhere to choose correctly and stay. After a lifetime of movement, the weight of it has worn me down. I cannot carry it physically anymore. So home becomes a pattern of recognition. The quiet yes in my body when something familiar returns.

Home, for me, exists in that brief coolness at the edge of spring and fall. In the windchimes outside my window. In the sky at dusk and the pale, almost nauseating light just before sunrise. In pants damp with morning dew, moving quietly between rows of vegetables. In the smell of backyard cookouts drifting over fences, through the soft glow of a neighborhood after dark.

Home has shown up in small memories: the passenger seat of my dad’s truck, driving through the night. Hospital stays. School. Always the library, where my grandmother taught me to read and time seemed to stand still. Cigarette smoke drifting across her Jeep. Following my mom through grocery aisles. The way her house held the scent of food she cooked for me, lingering proof she cared. In cooking for others now, the quiet satisfaction of nourishment moving outward from my hands.

I have felt home strongest in the woods, staring into my animal’s eyes; in my first best friend; and at night, when lightning bugs reveal themselves to people with imaginations. Staying awake until dawn with God shifting the unshiftable, then falling asleep satisfied, not exhausted. In fires bigger than houses. In basements. Living uninhibited, high, sweaty.

These moments share safety, not geography. Fleeting spaces where my nervous system settles. After years of displacement, I am certain independence is not home. Neither is beauty without belonging. Nature matters, but only when it is relational, tied to memory, to familiarity, to being held instead of tested.

Home is emotional safety and support, where being alive feels sustainable, not like suffering. Where silence is kind. Where there is room to grieve. To create. To rest unfinished. Not something I have owned. Something I am learning to recognize. What lets me exhale.