I grew up in two homes-my mom's and my dad's. My dad's house was comfortable, to be sure but there were always too many rules and it was too...clean! My mom, no matter where she lived, her house always felt like home. The kitchen was lived-in. There were newspapers in the living room, random books lying around, comfy couches to lounge on, it felt like a house where kids lived and indeed, kids did live there along with a menagerie of animals. My mom lived in three different places and each place always felt the same--like my mom.

I don�t really have a �home� anymore in any traditional sense. My mother died in my childhood home and it was sold shortly thereafter. Not quick enough in a sense that when she was sick and after she died it disintegrated in half-life speed. My poor father couldn�t take care of it and when my mother was alive�she was the house. It�s a little disconcerting (in more ways than the obvious) because I find that I am extremely emotionally connected to physical experiences and spaces. Since I left that house for good (having moved in and out of it for 8 years of my early adulthood) I rented a place in Brooklyn and now own my own town home in Virginia with my husband. Neither of which feel (or will ever feel) like home�despite the sense of belonging I feel with my husband. I suspect that once we have children the house they are raised in will finally elevate to the status of �home�. In the mean time I feel a little bit �at home� when I�m in the company of certain people. Being an only child with limited �first tier� relatives (I don�t even have first cousins!) that feeling surfaces only with one family member (aside from my father and husband) and otherwise with old friends. These people are tremendously comforting to me�the only people who physically knew me through so many stages of life. Who have some recollection or sense of me in pigtails, shiny-faced, excited about life and as overwhelmingly expressive as I am today. I know some of you read this blog (or write it): Thank you.

Home to me isn't necessarily where I grew up. Home to me has always been my bedroom. My parents still live in the house that they moved into 34 years ago. I have moved on my own several times since then and had many a bedroom. However, my bedroom has always been my solitude, my home. My childhood bedroom is now a den for my father, it's his solitude now.

However, there is one particilar bedroom I am drawn to remembering when I think of home. My paternal grandmother lived about 125 miles away and she kept a room there for any guest, but to me, it was my very own room. I used to stay with her for two weeks each summer. I have two younger brothers and this is one of the few things I ever did alone, all on my own, separate from them. My bedroom there was an attic room with slanted ceilings, walls and ceilings covered in wallpaper with small purple flowers all over it. It had hardwood floors, but a small rug protected my feet from the cold floor each morning as I leapt out of bed. In that small room, you were isolated from the rest of the house and a window airconditioner drowned out the noises from the floors below. The room was small and smelled like the wool coats stored in the closet. There was a big tall basket bearing peacock feathers outside the door. Strange thing to remember, but I can still recall touching them each time I entered or left the room.

I feel the same way about my current bedroom as I do about that one. It's upstairs, slightly isolated from the rest of the house, small and private. It's home to me now, just as that room was home to me when I was 12.

My home is never so far
as the nearest laugh,
the closest touch,
and the softest reminder
that I am truly loved.

I think I just wrote that for you. I don't really care for poetry. It just came out.

But what I really meant to tell you, before I accidentally wrote some mediocre verse, was that my home felt toxic to me for years. Even long after I left, the house seemed poisonous. Not really what I thought I should feel when I thought about my home. But when my brother and his family moved in, with the baby toys scattered around and the sound of my mother laughing and the babbling of an infant boy, it suddenly seems like home. Apparently, my home was dead, and needed to be born again.

My parents divorced when i was 3, and me and mum moved around quite a bit until my early teens. We then lived in the same house until i left to go to uni, at which time my brother took my room - so it dosent really feel like home.

I would have to say that the two places i mentioned in the memory question (the small spit of land in south devon, and wrapped up in a novel) feel the most like home, because they are where i am most calm and carefree.

Home is wherever you make your memories therefore home is ever changing.

I remember a line from "Nicholas Nickleby" when one character tells Nicholas "you are my home". That always impressed me because for me that's true. The people you love are your home. That's why memories of our childhood home, both happy and sad, are so powerful. That is where we first found love, felt safe and belonged. As we live in other domiciles throughout our lives the ones that truly feel like home are the ones where there is love. Then we are surely blessed.

Despite a house, life, husband and spawn of my own, I still call my parents house home.

I just feel like I don't have to be change when I walk through my parents front door, all pretense slips away and I can just be me, 100% me.