Home

Where's your home?
Me? I've just come back from a trip to my home town of Dunedin.  The Sister and I decided to relocate our annual girls weekend, offshore to New Zealand, for a chance to spend time with our Dad.  Although Dad is getting older, thankfully he is still pretty healthy which completely astounds us as he enjoys a ciggie and a drink.  In fact he poured us a gin when we arrived and I'm pretty sure that if you're imbibing that volume of quinine into your body on a daily basis, the medicinal impact can't be underestimated.  I think I was giggling by my third swallow.  I even asked Dad if he'd poured the gin in last (nope).

I love going home.  It's all just so familiar and simple.  I step off the plane, everything about home is there. The smells are intense, the light is crisper and everything seems so much clearer.  It feels like a time before in my life, everything seems a little slower, a little more peaceful.  It's almost like being in a time warp where I'm a 13 year old, in pyjamas in front of the fire, or an 18 year old driving the streets in winter time, wrapped in op shop old ladies coats and suede boots, looking for parties with my friends.  Seeing students living their student lives in the same flats in the same streets, makes me miss my student years, excited by the responsibility of study and the freedom of living away from home.  I watched a young woman pounding up the hills on a late Saturday afternoon run, with fading light, and I thought that was me, and wondered what I'd be doing tonight if I was still her.  I'm such a sappy sentimentalist.  But seriously I miss those times, I miss the friendships and I miss the freedom.  I had no idea what was coming in my life and how it took so many unexpected twists and turns.

You see if you asked me, I'd always say "home" is where my family is, my boys, my husband.  Wherever we are together is home.  Right?  Well mostly.  But do you believe you can have many interpretations of "home"?  You can have your physical home  but also you can have your emotional homes, you know, those places that just feel like home in your heart.  And maybe you've never lived there, but they just feel right, they just feel like you belong.  It's nice to think that there isn't just that one place.  And it's also nice to feel that new homes are always evolving.

Funny enough, I popped some photos on our old friend Facebook of my weekend back in Dunedin, and the emotional response I got from a nice mix of my friends, just reinforces that my home is also home to many of my dearest as well.  A shared emotional home, based on different experiences and memories, how comforting is that thought.

Home, where are your homes?  Where do you feel like you belong?